Snap Specs, Taste, Midjourney Hardware | Eric Newcomer, Merrill Lutsky, Carter Reum, Swami Sivasubramanian, Thomas Suarez, Mark Gurman, Ryan Daniels, Isaiah Granet

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Big show today.

Big show today. Lots of guests coming on. We got newcomer coming on, Mark Gurman's coming on, Carter Lee from Merrill.

I am super excited. For Eric to join.

Yeah.

I don't have time to listen to that many podcasts, but I love listening to Eric's podcast.

He's been on an absolute tear. His Kerr Swisher interview was very good. His Ed Zitron interview was very good.

He's been— He throws on the gloves.

Yeah.

And he's almost like a matador. He's almost like a matador, right? Yeah.

And it's interesting because, yeah, he— I don't know. He just has a very balanced view and keeps the conversation going and pushes people and gets things going back and forth. So very excited to chop it up with him. Anyway.

And then we have Merrill from Graphite, who made one of the plays, the absolute greatest plays of the year.

Truly.

Selling to Cursor, which of course shortly after that sold to SpaceX and is now up even further.

Yeah.

The TVB effect, really. Graphite was a sponsor, of course.

We did as much as we could. Then we have Carter.

We did 90% of the hard work.

Then we have Carter from M13 jumping on. We have Dr. Swamy from AWS joining, and then the Germinator, of course, and a number of other founders.

Yeah, big show. Anyway, Snap Spectacles, we talked about it a little bit yesterday. Feedback has been mixed. Not good, people don't like it. Pull up the picture from DJ Khaos. Glasses? What glasses? This one. Not this one. The next one.

It's really—

This one.

It's really tough because if a startup shipped these, everyone, like, they would be able to raise capital.

Go back to the other photo.

After you've seen this one, go back to the other photo. Looks really normal now.

There you go.

Honestly, the funny big exaggerated version makes me feel like these actually look really cool now. That— not those, that's too much. But you flip back, I'm into it now. It's actually inoculated me to the, oh, they're big, because I saw a bigger version and I like these. They're a little bit blocky, yeah, but it's like a style choice. I don't know, I'm getting, I'm getting pilled. I might pick up a pair.

Here's the thing.

I might pick up a couple pair.

If a startup launch this product and was able to do the demos that they can do. We've tried this product. We've done a number of the demos. That startup would be able to raise at, I would say, easily a billion just based on current market conditions. But they're, a startup is evaluated a lot differently, of course, than a public company that has spent somewhere in the range of $3.5 billion building this product.

Yeah.

Yet the feedback from the market has not been great.

The stock's down 92% over the last 5 years. And just in the last 5 days, down another 8.5%. And Evan Spiegel has been having to defend his decisions, his investment here. We'll see where all this goes. The question's like, how expensive is this effort? How core to the business is it? How many Snap employees are working on this? They have a great ads business, a great social media, with a network effect should be an AI winner. You know, just increase the ad load, increase the ad targeting, run a really lean, thin operation, and you should be able to be a very, very profitable enterprise. The era, clearly a lot of these investments were greenlit in the early days when the stock was up, when the market was booming. And now we're seeing them roll out and everyone's asking a wildly different set of questions because we're in the— In the trough. AI era, not the wearables era, but—

And Tyler in the chat says Snap down 92% since peak.

Yeah, peak ZIRP.

So you can imagine a lot of the work that was done on these was done when they were a much, much, much bigger company.

Yeah, but to be fair, Evan has been acquiring in this category and thinking about this for probably over a decade. I know I actually talked to a founder that he sold his company to Snap It must have been 10 years ago. And they bought a couple of companies and been working on this. And then of course they did have the first version of Spectacles, which were like the Meta Ray-Ban displays or the Meta Ray-Bans, no screen, but just camera. And the rollout for that was really well received, but never quite got to escape velocity where it really moved the needle for the business. But very clear, interesting R&D thinking. Anyway, Evan Spiegel is gonna have to defend himself from our own Brandon Gorell. Yeah. Because Brandon Rael came up to me after writing the newsletter and said, "I don't think I get it." And I'm like, "That's fine. We'll read through your piece. We'll steelman it. I'll steelman it, no problem." But first I'm gonna steelman CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.

I think it can steelman itself.

It can steelman itself, honestly. So let's read through Brandon's.

Hit it.

So Snapchat showed off Spectacles, its new augmented reality glasses. At Augmented World Expo 2026 yesterday. Interesting. I didn't realize that this was an industry conference for augmented reality, not a Snap-specific event. The features are a mix of things you'd want in a daily driver pair of glasses that you'd have on all the time everywhere. Maps, HUD, review of restaurants in your visual field, prosumer features like the ability to collaborate on shared virtual whiteboards and more general AI-powered assistance stuff like measuring distances. For you so you don't have to use a tape measure. The broad mix of features combined with the fact that specs are fairly pricey, $2,200 basically, and that they look painful to wear. So Brandon Gorell is pointing out the fact that Evan's ear looks a little bit bent from wearing the specs. The, what do they call that? The bar? What's that thing on the glasses? That goes in the back. I don't know, whatever that thing is, it's a little thick, it's a little heavy. There's a battery back there, probably some compute. And so that is compressing his ear a little bit. You imagine wearing that for 4 hours, maybe it gets a little bit tiring. We will see how—

Other scenario, he's getting some cauliflower ear, he's training. He sees Zac is, you know, gotten into MMA. He doesn't want to be left behind. So we don't know. Brandon asked a question. Tyler says it is the arm.

The arm.

Of the sunglasses. Where is Tyler, by the way? Oh, Tyler's going to—

Yeah, Tyler's going to the Midjourney event, which will also be interesting. There's a whole bunch of interesting hardware stuff happening in the midst of the AI boom. Midjourney's launching a hardware device tonight. No one knows exactly what it is. Surprising it hasn't leaked.

They got a lockdown over there.

They got a lockdown. It's great. Also, I think maybe, journalists don't think it's like the hottest scoop to go after, but still really impressive. I'm on the edge of my seat to figure out what they launch 'cause incredibly talented team, incredible business, incredible founder. And David Holes, the founder of Midjourney, started Magic Leap, an augmented reality or virtual reality company that would track your hand over this little device that was sort of the size of a stick of gum basically. Mm-hmm. Company, and you could strap it to the front of an Oculus Rift and it would track your hands while you were in VR. That company at one point sold to Apple almost and then got rolled back and then sold to another company and raised a bunch of money. And then David ran it all up again with Midjourney. It's a great story. Anyway, I love the Midjourney story, but I'm very excited. Back to specs. Back to specs. Are guys who golf every other weekend in the summer really going to drop over $2K so they can put on their pair of specs just when they need to see how many yards they are from the pin. I think a lot of golfers do have disposable income. The price tag might not be the issue. The question is, does this look cool on a golf course? Is this a— is this something that has like badge value if you pull out like a nice rangefinder, like a Titleist bag or something with a great brand? It feels like to make it cool, it's gotta be on the PGA Tour. The heroes that people look to need to be using this actively for the golf community to really—

Yeah, and so many cool use cases, but are any of them killer use cases? Is that true? No, I'm just saying, I'm saying like, that's a cool use case, you're trying to understand how a piece of furniture is gonna fit into your room. I don't— Yeah. I do that—

Mentally.

When I'm doing— You do it in your head. Like if I'm doing an interior design project, I might need that, but that's like a specific moment in time.

Yeah.

Maybe once every couple years at most.

Yeah.

For a lot of people, I feel like, you know, some people are kind of constantly adding furniture here and there, but a lot of people it's kind of you, set it and forget it. So, yeah, very, like, again, unclear why this is something you would want on your face all the time.

Glasses. I'm Googling Robert De Niro's Casino glasses. Yeah, these are pretty bulky here. We can share this in the chat here. Boom. Pull those up. Let's continue. So, You can buy rangefinders for around $150. They're not fragile. Also, a lot of golf heads, they're out there for more than the battery life. They're out there for more than 3, 3.5 hours. 3.5 hours might be enough for 9 on a busy course. They're doing 6 hours out there sometimes. You don't want to be out there with your augmented reality glasses and they die on you. Our DIYer is going to drop this much money just so they can have easy access tips for their home projects. Our startup's going to be willing to drop $2K for every employee who wants to collaborate in AR. All of these are examples touted on Snap's specs page as things you can do with the glasses, and the features do seem super cool. It's just hard to imagine any one of them justifying a $2K price tag, especially because they look painful to wear. And so that's your point about killer features. I disagree. I don't think that these products need a killer feature. I think the original killer feature of the iPhone was the phone. Like, people were already carrying phones., and the iPhone was like, we debated this before, but it had some call dropping problems, but it was a replacement for your dumb phone.

Yeah.

And then the fact that it also was an iPod was an extra feature, and then the fact that it was an internet browser was another feature, but it replaced like very, very basic things.

My thing is like I don't think as cool as the tech is, I don't think the tech is ready to be a daily driver computer.

Yeah. Well, I think it needs to replace a very regular everyday interaction thing like a screen. And so that's why I still think VR is like a replacement for the home theater, maybe a replacement for the 80-inch TV, but 80-inch TVs are like $500 now. And so you gotta get it to be better and you gotta have enough for everyone in your household to have one and it's gotta be a better experience. But in that world—

The other challenge is like a lot of these, I mean, like a lot of these use cases, I don't feel like are that aligned to Snapchat's user base. —and that's like the business.

Their business, yeah.

Like a $2,000—

Yeah, yeah.

A $2,000 device doesn't really align to their, what I believe is their core demo.

Yeah, and so Bugle Capital blokes asking the question, how did this happen? Do you know how deeply broken a culture has to be to ship this product and let the CEO walk around like this? Again, I don't think they look that bad, but there is this question of, you know, "Is this a serious product? The fashion part must be addressed first. I guess the taste memo never made it to Snap. If you're enough of a dork to have these on your face, you won't even get the chance to say, 'May I meet you?'" Wow. People are very, very upset about these. JB says, "I legit think this may be the first product ever to hit the market and not sell a single unit." That's ridiculous. They're going to sell a few to people that want to demo them. There's fans that buy every product. Palmer Luckey has a collection of augmented VR glasses. You know, the collectors will get them.

Let's pull up this post from A Capital because this might be a—

Yeah, we can watch this. This actually might be the killer feature, honestly. Thanks for joining us here today. You're wearing your new specs you just unveiled.

They cost $2,195. The stock's down more than 5%.

The sound effect, the sound mix is really good.

Thanks for joining us here today. You're wearing your new specs.

The sound mix, the fact that her voice gets quieter when you go inside the headset is really good. So, so funny.

The smile. I feel really bad for the Snap team. I think this— I think like the— I want them to win, but I don't think this launch will get them the level of traction that they're gonna need to justify further investment. Is my current view. Unless you're— unless, you know, Spiegel just doesn't care and, you know, continues to double or triple down, which is totally possible. But I think at a normal company, this would kind of be the last shot.

It's tough. You're competing with, like, these hyper-efficient Chinese companies. There's this company, XREAL. We demoed this. I got a pair for Tyler, took them for a spin. They're not quite there, but they're way cheaper. You're looking at a couple hundred dollars and you get a screen that's like not even really augmented reality. It's sort of like sunglasses with a screen inside, but then it projects like a 200-inch TV in front of you. And these are actually sort of, it's more chopping at the daily use cases and less doing like frontier technology. So yeah. You can play video games on them because you just plug the HDMI from the Xbox into the device and then you just have a big screen in front of you. And if you don't have a TV with you for mobile gaming, there's a whole bunch of different things you could watch movies on it, do the basic things that people do with screens. And I think that XREAL is on a path to like commoditizing this in a pretty significant way where— Yeah.

Not to mention Meta Ray-Ban displays are $799.

Yeah.

And I do believe that these have more, quite a bit, like more features, functionality. They have a bigger developer network.

But a lot of the killer features of like on-demand AI, instantiating a generative UI, answering a question for you, that can be done with a Call of Duty HUD.

That can be done with all this. And like Call of Duty. It's cool, but I cannot— I don't know anyone that would do this.

And you face this crazy cold start problem where the developers don't make anything because there aren't that many users. Like, I was— we were talking about this with YC yesterday. It is so crazy that even in the era of vibe coding and software being free, we're not seeing breakout Apple Vision Pro development. Like the Apple Vision Pro, which I need to bring in for Scott. He wants to demo it. Comes with a really, really impressive demo where it finds all the walls and then one of the walls opens up and is a portal. And through the wall you see this like dinosaur land. You'd love it as a dinosaur expert. Kids love it. And then a dinosaur comes through the portal, comes into your—

What kind of dinosaur?

It's like a velociraptor type thing.

Okay. Let's double check.

I've never heard of that. And a butterfly lands on your finger and it feels like it almost— you almost feel it because it's so— it's like tracking your hand and lands. Very cool. It's like a 5-minute demo that the Apple team clearly worked very hard on. That feels like something that could be expanded on very cheaply in the age of vibecoding and yet, no one sees it as an economic opportunity. Developers are just— they'd rather build an app for the iOS App Store. And so, No one's really going there to compete. So while these demos look really cool, where's the ecosystem going to come from if they're not selling millions and millions of units and people are ready to purchase games or, you know, see ads or do anything that could monetize a business built on the back of this platform? It's a very, very tricky proposition to get a platform like this up and running. Anyway, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is a commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And Harley had some big news today. We can play a video from Shopify later in the show, but David Holes is saying you'll wanna see this. They're announcing their first hardware project tomorrow, which is today at 6:00 PM. I believe Tyler from our team will be in attendance checking it out, reporting back. Stay tuned for a livestream of our in-person launch event in San Francisco. If you're in town and want an invite, reply below. There's a few slots left, so go check it out if you're in SF.

Yeah, it's interesting. You know, this hardware project, I guess in some ways is probably funded by Meta and the licensing deal that they have. The other thing about Midjourney, privately held company, right? They haven't, they don't have like tens of thousands of shareholders that have lost money on the business. And so it's almost like pure upside. Whereas I think like part of the reaction to, the negative reaction to Snap is looking at all the comment— looking at all the people sharing negative things, I can imagine 90% of those people have owned the stock at some point or another, have lost money on it, and so they're just already inclined to have a negative view on anything the company does and not give the leadership the benefit of the doubt really in any way at all. Yeah. But very, very excited for this, and hardware is hard, but— I think the more shots on goal, the better.

Yeah. Well, the other story that's burning up the timeline is Taste Labs put the timeline in turmoil, people going back and forth. So yesterday, a former Exa AI Labs founding team member introduced her startup Taste Labs, whose mission is to end AI slop. Quote, "This requires turning a fuzzy subjective domain into something we can measure and codify. We're starting with design, her post says. More specifically, Taste says they're working with Frontier AI Labs to improve their models along taste lines through data labeling and app layer startups to improve the aesthetics of their products. This has been a critique of vibe-coded projects. They all sort of look the same. Of course, there are examples of really cool projects, but people were starting to say, "Oh, this has like the vibe code look to it, or this model's not good at front end, et cetera. Her goal is to fix that. Tai's post— her post was immediate— immediately went viral, generating tons of opinions on X and getting over a million views in 24 hours. People's main complaint is basically you can't program taste. It's impossible, they say. But the steel man is that the AI aesthetic— AI's aesthetic output can be improved., and that it's perfectly reasonable for a startup to try and capitalize on that opportunity. I wanna talk to you about taste, about your feed. Is it scalable? Is it not? Give me, take me through some of the critiques here. Tell me what resonates with you. And then I have a take about where the business goes.

So I think the main thing is, main thing is people have taste fatigue. They don't want to hear that word anymore. I don't want to hear that word anymore.

'Cause for the last 6 months, maybe last year, it's been like the code word. Like, what will we do when the AI can do all the technical stuff? Well, we'll have the taste.

Yeah, and so yeah, I think there's fatigue around the usage of the word, even the conversation. We've never even like waded that deeply into the conversation, and I'd like to keep it that way. That being said—

But just to set the table on the critique, like, a lot of people outside of tech are critiquing it because a lot of SF people in tech are saying taste is so important and the outsiders don't see San Francisco tech—

As being tasteful people.

—as being particularly tasteful people from a fashion perspective, from an art perspective, or a curation perspective. It's sort of known as the t-shirts and athleisure community, and that's— it's optimized. It's devoid of taste by design. It's about efficiency, not taste.

Yeah, and then I'll say one more thing, and then I'll steal man Taste Labs. But so the main thing is, like, when I think of, like, taste, like product taste, like I think of linear, right? Like linear has always been very opinionated. Very quality-driven, they want to grow quickly because of how great the product is, like, you know, very, very design-driven. Like, that is a company that I think generally has very high, you know, good taste, right? The problem is when you have good taste and people pick up on it, they just start sort of just like blanket, like, copying you, right?

Sure, sure, sure.

So then there's an entire generation of companies that just look like linear, right? From their website to the actual product. And so, taste is something that people curate themselves, but then the, as soon as it's copied, then it's like fundamentally like not tasteful in my view, right? Then it's not original. I think taste has, you know, you need some originality to be able to combine, you know, do 1 1 2. Mm-hmm. And another example is like—

Isn't 1 1 3?

Sorry, sorry, sorry. 1 1 2. 1 1 11. 1 1 2. That's the ad.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

That fake startup ad. No, so another example is like Squarespace.

Sure.

Like Squarespace took like high-end website design and then just democratized it. Yeah, democratized it. Democratized it, right? Anybody could have a pretty website. And then you started to just— I would just look like, okay, is this a Squarespace website or did this person make it?

Okay, it's a Squarespace.

Website, like, and not— it's not really that much of a knock, but like, it wasn't like the company's own taste that led to that output or the people that they worked with. So it commoditizes really quickly and then it ceases to be tasteful. That being said, just helping AI Labs create better looking outputs and working on that problem feels like a pretty good way to get to build at least temporarily a pretty big business, because this is something that users really care about, the labs really care about, hyperscalers even care about, right? And so I think that while Tase Labs got a lot of flak over the last 24 hours, they probably, their pipeline probably exploded, and I bet they get a ton of business out of it.

Yeah.

And very unclear what this business looks like in, 5 years like a lot of the other companies in the category, but I bet they print in the short term.

Yeah, I feel like a lot of the training data, data labeling—

Also the name, the name is like kind of perfect rage bait. Taste Labs, we're building final taste in a lab. We built it, we made it.

Yeah, it is funny because you could do the inverse and say our job is to just identify things that are not tasteful, and the end product would be exactly the same because you're just— that's just your negative dataset and everything else is positive by that design. But a lot of the data labeling projects have just been, does the button work? Does this render properly? Like, is this just— is this functional? And some of that's been able to be looped in a reinforcement learning environment. Some of it's been able to be encoded just tagging, okay, does the photo have 6 fingers or 5 fingers? Like that was a useful piece of data labeling that happened probably 2 years ago. Now there's a bigger question about what actually looks good and then how do you represent like a diversity of tasteful designs such that everything just doesn't collapse into like the new corporate Memphis and everything that's AI-generated has the exact same flavor. Like the, it's not this, it's that, but for design would be the bad outcome.

Yeah, which is like already extremely easy to clock. Right now, yeah. And I got a deck last night, friend of mine, his company, and my first piece of feedback is like, are you okay with, with everyone knowing that you didn't put any effort into design? Because it's totally possible the answer is yes.

Yeah.

But at least you should go into your fundraise process knowing that everyone is gonna know that you just tried to one-shot this. You're slopping it up. Which again, for some businesses is fine, and some investors is fine, but it's gonna turn some people off.

Yeah. Yeah, people are going all back and forth on this. This highlights a fundamental misunderstanding in tech. Not everything can be codified and analyzed. "Even if you make AI imitate taste, whatever that means, it still won't mean anything. Taste emerges from craft, context, meaning, subjectivity, and genuine care." That's sort of true, but just increasing the quality of design is valuable. But yes, it is a tall order when you use the word taste because so much baggage has been assigned to that. Well, you know what the most tasteful database is? It's MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. You know what else is tasteful? Chris Larsen from Ripple has been buying an absolute absurd amount of cars recently. He got an F1 GTR, a 918 Spyder, a P1, a T50, an Enzo, a Sesto Elemento. Has probably spent like $50 million on cars in the past year. I think it's more than $50 million if you total all those up.

The P1 he has is insane.

Where is that? Is that in the comments?

It's green. It's a green on tan P1.

Green on tan. Looking good. Post them all. They're on the Cesario Collection on Instagram. Wow. Yeah, the dark green is a good, good, good image. This is quite the collection that's emerging. Well, very tasteful. You can go check it out on Instagram. 'Cause we love that.

Speaking of, I mean, taste in Silicon Valley, what could be a Mansory body kit on a Model 3?

Oh, Lucci.

'Cause that says, kind of like this high-low approach, it says, like, I'm practical. I want a car that gets me to point A to point B. But I wanna look good.

Yeah, it's sort of like, it's a metaphor for taking like a sort of slop-filled base model and then stuffing taste down it with a bunch of fine-tuning.

Because everyone, when they think of Mansouri, they think of like, you know, really high taste.

Maybe. Depends who will be doing the labeling. Will it be Mansouri people? There's also a bunch of back and forth going on about Netflix buying Lionsgate potentially. Sources familiar with the matter disputed Semaphores reporting. There was a whole bunch of back and forth about, is Netflix going to buy something else? Were they in the bidding war? For Roku, and they're taking shots at each other. Semaphore, what you got? Ben Smith says, "Congrats on helping with the cleanup. They could have gone to Variety and chose you." I'm not even sure what this tweet means, Sharon. Cleanup on aisle Semaphore, my dear Ben. All I'm saying is they're now saying on the record that they're not interested in Lionsgate, never were. Would have been happy to amplify your scoop too. They're fighting. They're fighting, the timeline's in turmoil. Anyway, we have the perfect person to discuss journalistic timeline and turmoil back and forth, I don't know. We have Eric Newcomer from Newcomers, the founder and writer. Welcome to the show. How are you doing there?

Finally.

Finally, I'm so sorry. Good, my name is Jeremy.

First, first, apologies.

Dude. It's been way too long. You know I've been a fan since Dead Cat.

It should've been, it should've been.

I'm not kidding. I've listened to every episode and you've been on an absolute tear. And I'm sorry that we went back and forth We both barely live in Instagram or in Twitter DMs. And so our chats are just like, "Yeah, let's do it." And then like 5 days later, "Oh, sorry, dropped it. Oh, sorry, I dropped it." But anyway, I'm glad you're here. How you doing?

Here we are. And I tweeted, "This is a big moment for me." I'm glad. Literally, I'm having Ben Smith record on my podcast tomorrow. So it couldn't have been a better—

You can get to the bottom of it.

I haven't even dug into this. So it's like you're giving me notes.

Material.

To ask him about.

You gotta ask him the hard questions. What happened with the minor scoop around—

You have the— I really, we were saying it when the show kicked off.

Generational run.

Generational run with—

Generational run.

And I, when I listen to your show, I'm like taking notes. It's like, you actually have a really, I was calling you like the matador.

Oh yeah.

You're with like a bull and you're trying to get them to like kind of run at you, but then they run at you and you sidestep them.

It's really good.

It's really good.

And it's just, I don't know.

That's very kind of you.

Do you feel like you occupy like an interesting space? Because I feel like you're not some like tech optimist, pumper insider, right? Like you have, you know, what, 6 years in at Bloomberg, serious journalistic chops, but then you interact with people who come at you with like crazy anti-tech takes and you're able to sort of like play the pro-tech guy in some ways. Like what's going on?

It's very confusing sometimes. You know, I'm someone who came up through journalism. You know, I was working the last guy in through the normal, like I was in my hometown paper, the Macon Telegraph, Sun Sentinel, Tampa Bay Times, New York Times, just like interning my way up, just doing the journalism thing. Thank God Jessica Lessin brought me to work for The Information. I was the first employee. So it was like, oh, No way.

No way.

Silicon Valley thing. Very interesting. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. And so I was working out of her like apartment in Dolores Park.

Cool.

And then I, yeah, I worked at Bloomberg for 6 years. Yeah. And, you know, started to really get Silicon Valley. And so when I launched Newcomer, I did write that I wanted contrarian optimism. You know, I felt like I started my time as a tech reporter being more negative than most because that was the era of, you know, sort of the gadget blogger.

Yeah.

And then by the end of my time at Bloomberg, we had sort of the infiltration of, you know, the political reporter who was really gunning for Facebook or whatever. Yeah. It went from everybody's too soft, everyone's too negative. And I really just wanted to write for like your audience, you know, people in Silicon Valley, people who got it, didn't want to have to explain who Marc Andreessen and Ben, you know, Bill Gurley were and just sort of write for the people. And sometimes that's positive, sometimes that's negative. Puts me in a sort of weird situation.

So I feel like I'm also having trouble putting you in a bucket as like, commentary, interviewer, scoop master, scoop athlete. You get some scoops, but it's not the only thing that you do. Like, we talk to a lot of people who are just great yappers and they've never gotten a scoop and that's fine. And they have great commentary and they can talk about anything, it's amazing. And then there's other people who are just great interviewers and they, every week they're delivering like the best guest. And then there's other people who are the scoop athletes and you never really hear them give a take or their opinion, but they're like pastoring everyone in Signal all day long, I suppose. But is that by design? Is that something you see like fragmenting over time as you build the organization? Like, what, is there a method to the madness or is it just like you enjoy all 3 things so you've been down this route?

It is sort of, you know, you do best what you enjoy. I've never heard anyone call me an athlete before, a Scoop athlete.

Scoop doggy dog.

I think Scoop said it best today to say, you know, we're essential reading. I think the best takes are ones where, you know, you go talk to people who know and then you're like, it's not just like I made this up. It's like, yeah, I talked to people, it's gonna be right. You know, I want my predictions to come true. I think the best coverage, you know, doesn't just sound smart today. You know, you look back and you're like, oh, we were saying Google was undervalued when the stock, you know, wasn't getting the credit. You know, you want to feel like we were right. Like, look back and read the record. And that's how you build a reputation over time.

So would you say you give financial advice?

I want people to make money. I want it to— I just not, you know, that's not the goal, but I want people to read it and they make more money. And so it feels like it's worth subscribing. But yeah, we do. We do whatever we want, you know? Yeah.

It's newcomer, it's from guy. So diversity in the content from a personality-driven, but you do have other folks on staff and then also diversity of revenue streams, right? Ads, subscriptions, and events. Like, was that deliberate on day one? I feel like a lot of people focus, like, I don't know, it's interesting, it's worked, but it's like, it feels contrarian in the new media sense 'cause most people will just be like, oh, I wanna be like Ben Thompson, only subscriptions or TBPN's only ads or someone's like, are really in the conference business, or they do that like way later. It feels like you were able to land 3 planes simultaneously pretty quickly.

Yeah, I mean, today event sponsorship is our main revenue stream with newsletter subscriptions being our second largest. I mean, I did the Substack thing in 2020 in the pandemic and it was like, this seems like fun. Finally something in startup world. Applies to me, I'll jump on that. And I was one of the top tech Substacks. 2023, I had not jumped on crypto, right? Like I'm sort of a crypto hater, but 2023 I'm like, I don't know, ChatGPT, this seems real, you know, this is actually the tech trend that people have been waiting for and not something that was like getting ginned up. So I had access to a beautiful office in Hayes Valley. My friends now, their company is Weekend. We put on the first Cerebral Valley AI Summit. It was just sort of like this worked. People were enthusiastic, you know, Ali Ghodsi connected with Naveen Rao at MosaicML, acquired the company for $1.3 billion. You don't get better press than that, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

Business Insider put in a beautiful headline, you know?

Yeah.

And so we were off to the races. We're literally doing our mid-year Cerebral Valley AI Summit in London next week. So ramping up for that. So yeah, it's events, subscriptions, trying to, I'm out, I'm out hustling, trying to follow your, sponsorship playbook. So if you wanna put in a good word for people, the newcomer all around, like— I'd love it. I mean, I'd love it.

There's a tuneover, happy to talk right there.

I mean, the pre-roll or the mid-roll Host Read ad in your podcast, I think would do very well. And I mean, I like that there's no ads when you're sparring with somebody, but you did have the mic drop at the end of the Ed Zitron episode, which I very much enjoyed. And yeah. If you'd snuck an ad in there, I would've been like, "You earned it," you know? Would've been good.

Yeah.

Anyway, talk about how you're thinking about covering some of the big stories right now. Like SpaceX is dominating the news, but it's an interesting company to cover because Elon's like one of the first like go-direct CEOs. He doesn't do a lot of like management interviews. You don't really like do interviews with other people. Like we have somebody from, we have a VP of Agentic AI from AWS coming on the show. They're happy to talk up and down the stack. You don't get that access at SpaceX necessarily. How do you think about what your audience wants to hear from you on SpaceX?

I mean, they, yeah, they control their own social media network. They can publish directly.

Apparently they're not doing SEC filings or something. Do you see this? They're not doing conference calls.

Yeah, they'll just put it on X.

But they'll just put it on X. It's hilarious.

I mean, for the most part, the newsletter really covers, you know, earlier stage startups. On our sort of Friday is like a step back. And so we cover SpaceX a lot there. I mean, all this money is about to flow into Silicon Valley. So just everybody getting rich and that being great for the startup ecosystem is definitely one theme. And who's getting rich and who got in early is certainly important to us. And then, yeah, we can't help ourselves but say this is like madness. I feel like even people buying the shares—

Oh yeah.

You know, know that it's sort of a part psychological stock where it's like, well, is there, other money that's going to come in that's going to boost this thing up. And it, you know, as someone who's fairly bullish on Anthropic and OpenAI to some degree, like SpaceX just feels like total lunacy given the sort of insane TAM story that you have to believe. So, yeah, you're getting some of our commentary that it feels, feels somewhat ludicrous, but trying to root it in the S-1 and just keeping it in the numbers.

It seems valuable.

You do some reporting on where, where the SpaceX employees are going to be doing their upcoming purchasing activity.

Homes?

There's variety. Coffee markets, you better get ahead of it. There's a variety of communities where—

You gonna say the one you're thinking of?

If you look at them, there's only a few homes listed. And I'm like, knowing, like, there's a car club, this racetrack, and it's called Willow Springs. It's an old racetrack. They're putting a car club there. I know for a fact that a bunch of them are signing up there.

Thinking about that.

I'm a little bit nervous that there's— that I share too many interests with the SpaceX team.

Oh, yeah, you're priced out by these, yeah.

Yeah.

One less, I guess, serious question. Do you think mocking VCs should be illegal? Because there's been a little bit of some drama on the timeline.

Or do you think in— I mean, if you major in venture capital in college, they should teach you about the Streisand effect.

Yeah, yeah.

That might be another one.

No, but there's been some drama on the timeline this week with VC brags, and I'm just, I'm wondering, you know, Silicon Valley has a lot of power in Washington right now, and I'm wondering if now is the time to push to make it just straight up illegal.

End this scourge. Like, it's just, yeah. You know, we tweak venture capitalists.

Of course.

I guess I'm humorless. Humorless on this. Yeah, I don't know. VC always needs to be better at taking criticism. Sometimes you're up, sometimes you're down. It's like better to be in the mix. Like in some ways the SaaS, you know, helps you clean up your message a little bit. So I'm always—

Oh, sorry, S-A-S-S, not S-A-A-S. It's like SaaS. I mean, that does get to something else, which is like, do you get AI fatigue like we do sometimes where we're like, oh, Like the Snap Spectacles thing we spent 20 minutes on at the top of the show, and like, is it the most consequential story, consequential technology? It's an $8 billion company, it's a new consumer product, but it's something that's like tangible that at least you can like dig into. How do you, how do you balance like what is tangible and interesting to the reader with where the market cap is actually moving, which might be at the Frontier Labs or the Databricks of the world that's a little more abstract?

I feel so lucky to cover venture capital because you get to cover interesting stuff that makes a lot of money, right? Like I could write about oil and gas and it's like you'd follow the dollars, but it's like super boring. So to me, venture's already pretty exciting. Like writing about AI, you get to talk about artificial general intelligence and like whether it's sentient and these have like, it has real like business consequences. So I don't really get tired of the AI story. I mean, certainly AI is dominating, you know, basically all the investment activities. So it becomes a huge focus of ours. So no, I'm less likely to get dragged into the Snap spectacle stuff. I mean, it's always fun to watch for new hardware, but just this question of, you know, are workers getting totally disrupted? Will, you know, change the course of American business? We have these enormous IPOs. So it's one of the more enjoyable times. To be a business reporter where the stuff you want to write about, which is a new intelligence being birthed by Silicon Valley, matches, you know, the market caps and what's interesting. And so following the money for the most part has been, you know, a super gratifying story. And so we tend— we tend to stay pretty focused on that.

How are you answering that question of like job displacement? Obviously, there's like economic numbers. There's also just sort of reverting back to like your own personal experience. Like, are you seeing competition on Substack from like slop farms, like—

Definitely, yeah, I think—

Tim Ferriss just wrote about this.

There's at least one guy clearly ranked above me who's using AI to write the stuff, which is just fascinating.

And where does that leave, like, have you grappled with like what the response is? Because it feels like the scoops are very, very protected in this, or like AI resistant. Distant, but maybe, you know, history or breaking down or analyzing, taking a press release that's already out there, synthesizing some data and history, that's maybe a little bit more commoditized, but how are you grappling with it?

Yeah, I mean, I think coming from a perspective, being a person, so transcending just a writing style, but it is literally—

Yeah.

Someone in a publication is accountable, is defensible. But certainly as the sort of writing quality of AI gets better and better, I'm not ruling out the possibility that it's super disruptive. Yeah, like you said, scoops. I think the sense that, you know, the information is coming from real humans, that like I'm in the business of knowing what other humans are thinking, is fairly defensible. But, you know, we're using AI to build, you know, like our ticketing platform for our events. Sure. One of my reporters was talking about using it just to build his own, like, story tracker. I think we're trying to be creative. Like, I'm— I don't want sort of AI-written stuff in our stories, but I do sort of have existential questions about, you know, like the fifth sentence in the third paragraph.

Yeah.

AI puts out a better version than you were going to spend the time to do. Is it really a disservice to readers that you went in and, like, punched that up? And I, you know, I think it's probably good for readers. So it's hard to have this super hard line of all human-written stuff because we certainly want it for— it's a great copy editor. You know, I pay a human copy editor, but still I run stuff through Claude and it's amazing how much it's catching both, you know, it'll catch like million, billion type errors, math, and obviously all sorts of minor typos.

Yeah, I'm imagining that I feel no sadness about you never writing the line, "They declined to comment," ever again. It is fine if that is, it can be a Python script. It doesn't even need to be GenAI. It can just be like an if statement because that line is in so many news articles.

We can have ones that's like take out all the perfunctory lines of stories that they feel inclined to put and you could—

I would like that version a lot of times.

When you think about disruption for like a newsletter or media business, however you wanna describe it, the only person that I think would actually be able to compete, like you weirdly need like a network, you need like trust, you need like, there's so much like information that I would say informs your work and other, other journalists that run similar businesses that's just like not anywhere online. Like it truly only exists in a small group chat or places like that. And so the question is like, I don't think a fully, I don't think AI can like actually just like somebody with AI that is able to build up the trust in the network and the kind of understanding of the space. Yeah, that person is like, if they're willing to just use more AI than you and like they don't care about like the slop allegations or whatever, then maybe they have some type of advantage. But I still feel like more than, more than ever, there's so much information that, that you need to run a great media business that is not anywhere on the internet. It's not in podcasts, it's not on X, it's— you just have to go actually talk to people.

We play nice with R for Rock, but honestly, it's is, you know, people in the industry giving it away for free, you know, the desperation for basically content marketing, meaning that some people do a good job of taking sort of their data and using it to get attention. Like you think about, I don't know, I don't know, Ramps AI spend data or something.

Right.

Yeah. Like that stuff, you know, used to be sort of the fodder of like a Wall Street Journal type story. And so to some degree, I think everyone being smarter that they need to, have actually like great content to get people to pay attention is one of the vectors of attack, not attack on media, but just competitive.

Yeah, like walk me through the, the Ramp AI spend is like an example of like going direct in the sense that they publish it themselves, they tweet about it, they go on podcasts about it. The ADP jobs data just gets released on a newswire and then contextualized by the web. Wall Street Journal, but if ADP all of a sudden hired some really charismatic employee to go on podcasts, that would be like the same effect.

And a lot of, you know, the old way of doing it would be you try to embargo it to a couple outlets, so they felt like they were really getting something, so then their readers feel that this is a differentiated thing that they're receiving, incrementally more reason to subscribe to that publication. And so, so it used to be a dance that you'd basically be giving the media sort of favor and sort of unique access that we sort of lose over time.

Do you, 10 years from now, would you— can you imagine having, you know, 10, 20 journalists on staff joining forces, you know, sort of rebundling, or do you like being unbundled?

I mean, you know, I have, you know, Madeline Rendbarger, Tom Dautant, Jonathan Weber writing for me. Now, and they're sort of a core part of what Newcomer is today. And certainly, you know, with unlimited resources, part of what I want to spend the money on is great journalism, good reporting. It's sort of— it's amazing that, you know, most cynically, like, our content marketing for events is profitable, generates subscription revenue, people demonstrate real value. Yeah. You know, it's like you— the journalism provides sort of a great way to remind people about the amazing events we're putting on. And so I think it's super synergistic. So yeah, I'd love to keep building up a newsroom, but I don't really believe in a sort of rebundling of Substacks. Like part of it, we're all building separate brands. You know, Newcomer has its own brand proposition and a lot of the other Substacks people like just are sort of, you know, I love— For good reason. Lenny is like crushing it, right? But it's a very different thing focused on product managers. And so if you even look at tech and business Substacks, we're so different that I've never really been a believer that there's gonna be a rebundling in that sense. But some publications like the Free Press or the Ankler, or myself, get to a level of scale where we become, start to look more like publications.

Yeah, it certainly didn't really happen on YouTube. Like there are a whole bunch of different creators and MrBeast has a whole team and offshoot channels, but with the MrBeast brand and the promise and the editing But it was never like, oh, MrBeast is gonna roll up other creators. 'Cause that's not the way the setup has worked. Talk to me about Mafia. I think we agree that we don't need other venture capital firms with game shows, but—

Don't copy TVPN, do a new thing.

Yes, yes. And I love that for that reason. But do we need a game show with just journalist competitors? Like an American Ninja Warrior with just Substackers?

What do you think about that pitch? Or Nitro Circus.

Nitro Circus would be good.

I'm not building my business around it. I'm happy to go on.

You would participate?

Yeah, yeah. Sign me up. But as you guys know, the challenge of media is sustaining it, right? Sure. Like, I mean, and kudos to Mike Solana at Pirate Wires. Obviously he's delivering day in and day out. He gets it. But I do think for like show concepts, it's fun to get excited about the idea, but the business is in the long term. Like, is there variety? Do you have something great? Day in and day out. So some of these things, it's like, yeah, when you have, you know, the top people you'd want for a Mafia show, it's exciting, but is their like 5th episode with, you know, the C-tier founders as much of a sort of much what, must watch?

I'm a little confused.

But that's what's interesting about Mafia is that it's not a new company. It's not an enterprise that needs to sustain. It can be just—

A fun thing.

A fun thing that goes as long as it needs to, doesn't overstay its welcome 'cause it's not this self-perpetuating, 'cause they have $60 billion in SpaceX coming to hire some camera crews if they need, you know, like that is the nature of like what's unique about—

I'm laughing at the production. I haven't watched, I have not watched the full thing. Tom Dutton on my team wrote the piece.

Yeah.

But I do think, you know, the traitors is so exaggerated and there's a reason for it. I still, I'm not saying that I could host it that way, but there is a reason that Hollywood and the TV business is so exaggerated. And I think they still need to up it even more, the sort of drama of it all.

Yeah, yeah. I saw some people like chirping at the fact that like it only had 100,000 views on YouTube. And I'm like, that is insane for tech. That is insane. And like, who, like the guests, like who knows these people? There's only a couple.

Only Alex and Tom Hanks left in tech world right now.

There's only like a couple thousand founders that matter to a top-tier venture capital firm. There's only a couple founders that, couple thousand founders that even know who these people are. Of course, like some of the contestants were bigger names, but by and large, these are insiders around the table.

They weren't gonna take Founders Fund's money, but now that Trey is great, they're in.

Yeah, yeah, maybe.

How are you thinking about, the evolution of the tier 1. It feels— the tier 1 VC, it feels like the tier 1 VCs of, you know, when you started Newcomer are not the same today. They're constantly—

This is spicy. This is the question of all questions. I mean, I want to say, first of all, I mean, I would always— I'd put Sequoia, I guess, number 1 to answer the question. I think I wrote a piece—

Well, I'm not even telling you, I'm not even telling you like to give me— Name them all? Name them all. But you're welcome, you're welcome to, but this will be a scoop for us.

This will be a scoop for us.

Who do I think are the top 2?

No, no, I just mean like, to me, to me there's been a very, like a very, very material shift and no one has like really said it out loud. Like there hasn't been, I think you'd be in a position to actually do this because you have to go talk to the top 100 founders under $10 billion market cap or below and say like at Series A, you basically, like make them choose who they would pick every single round.

You've done this, right?

And there's been some like random, there's been some like random kind of like surveys and like games that you can play to try to get at it. But like, I think if you actually had it, like you were—

Who is the core gen? I've seen this idea on Twitter. Like, and people, who is the firm or who, where's the real switch? Or who do you think the swap would be?

I just, Yeah, I think that there's a very real, like at least when I talk to founders, like founders wanna work with not necessarily like other founders as in like a founder who had an IPO, but they wanna work with the founders of the firms. And so there's like a new generation of like, you know, the Thrives and the Green Oaks and things like that where I see them as like, —really, really—

Thrive is dominating. They were certainly coming up soon on my list.

Yeah. And when you get in a situation, like hypercompetitive, like Series A, Series B, those guys are really sharks, right? And where do they fit in?

The fall-off of Arthur Rock— not our fur rock, but the original Arthur Rock— needs to be studied. The guy funded Apple, Intel, absolutely insane portfolio, goes out investing with Bernie Madoff. He gets outed for that in 2009. There's a firm that really fell off from the top.

Wait, did he just get screwed by Bernie or he was—

He probably got screwed. It's not even that bad, but I don't know. Yeah.

I mean, how much do you think returns are gonna drive this, right? In the cool venture story, like getting in Anthropic right now, or obviously making much money on SpaceX, It's like you look at Spark doing the round that people underestimated, that that's clearly been really good for them. I mean, Lightspeed dumped a ton of money in and Menlo, you know, I think it was key, key to them. So there are firms where I think it's had a big impact on their reputation, but I don't know if that matches.

I think that's helpful. I think that's helpful with LPs. But like the reason that it's an interesting question is like, okay, who has the best best overall brands, right? Who has like the most like halo? Which firms do founders actually wanna work with, right? Who has like the most access to capital? Like all these things factor in, who did like, who did the—

Elo, like if you—

Yeah, yeah.

Between these two firms, which one are you picking?

Yeah, like people that bet on Anthropic.

But that's completely different thing from actually measuring the quality of the venture capital business that is being done. Being built, and people still conflate two different goals. One is the sexy seed round to multi-billion dollar exit in a very short amount of time. Cursor's a great example of like, it's just classic venture capital. You got in sub a billion, you were out at 60 within 3 years. It's just incredible venture capital.

Our chief biz dev, yeah.

Right? Incredible venture capital. Yeah. But then there's a different game where that investment returns $3 billion in 3 years. And then there's a different one where you put $10 billion in a lab at $500 billion and it doubled. And so you made more money. And at the end of the game, these venture capital firms are businesses. The job is to return cash flow, like to create cash. And so yeah, oh, this fund had to raise more money. That's not really a critique. That's a critique of like, What's the definition of venture capital? Should we include growth stage investing in that? Should we include your public business in there? But like, as a financier, as an entrepreneur of a financial company, all you care about is how much cash are you returning to your investors and to your GPs? And so there's two very different games that are being played. One is for clout and credibility, and the other is just how much raw cash is this business throwing off? What's the value of the firm? Yeah.—

Yeah. And I look at it like when I, in the most simple view, I think about a Series A or a Series B, and a founder gets 10 term sheets hypothetically. And then you run that and you ask, you know, 100 founders that, like who comes out in the top 3? That to me is like the most interesting because that's like a generally gonna be a leading indicator for like who—

Sure.

Who has the most aura,— you know, kind of—

The ora list, the newcomer ora list.

The newcomer ora list. The newcomer ora list.

We've done— we did Founder's Choice a while ago, which was these guys.

Elo, right?

That was more like, you know, it was a little more like founder-friendly.

Yeah. Who do you want to work with?

We've published, you know, an LP did a survey of managers. So we try to— there's so many different ways to slice it. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, getting great returns, I think it has some impact on, you know, you know, your heft with founders. Founders like winners, people who are making a bunch of money. But I agree that you can't just look at returns and say those are the ones that are gonna get picked by—

There's also an interesting dynamic, particularly with Sequoia, where for a long time they had a reputation as being like not particularly founder-friendly. I mean, it is the genesis of Founders Fund is like the whole PayPal drama around Sequoia, right? And it's like, what if there was a firm that was founder-friendly? And then that went off and happened. And now, you know, obviously there's a lot 'cause there's an entirely new team there, it's a new strategy. But I talk to founders who are like, "Yeah, they're not friendly, and I'm getting in the gladiatorial arena with them. Like, it's a lion and I'm gonna ride it." Like, and they're excited by that. And they're like, "Yeah, if I don't put up insane returns, they're going to fire me." That's encouraging. Like, I need that, I need to grind harder. And so there's this weird thing where if you're measuring just on like, who will have your back unconditionally, there could be some really terrible venture capitalist out there who's not gonna help you. Help you, but also never gonna fire you. And they're just kind of like, yeah, I gave you their dumb money. But so there's a lot more to the shape of like the thing, but that adds aura too. 'Cause like you can be, I mean, we had Andrew Reid on the show and he said, Sequoia won't stab you in the back, will stab you in the front. And I was like, that is high aura.

From their lips.

And like, I mean, I'm not in a position to raise money from Sequoia right now, but like, I was like, I kind of wanna work with Andrew. Like after that, that's great. Like, I like that. And that is a good defining line there. Anyway, I don't know.

Yeah, I think, you know, good founders like tough investors.

Totally. Yeah.

But yeah, I agree. You know, competition and capitalism forced all these venture funds to realize that founders were their main customer and therefore they needed to say they were super founder-friendly. And, you know, I think Benchmark's doing a good job with the rebuild, but having—

Ship of Theseus.

You know, Travis and Emil running around being like, they screw founders over. Like, I don't think—

It's like Ev Randall was drinking beers I was in college when that happened, okay? Let's back off of that truck for a little bit. Let's not visit the sins of the father on the son, right? Isn't that in the Bible? On this list, you know, competing with the Midas list or doing some other list, or like, how valuable are lists in terms of like actual moving the needle for your business? Like early on at TVPN, we did the Metis List, which was like a list of AI researchers, and it converted a decent amount of email subscribers 'cause we had like an email capture flow. We weren't like directly monetizing it, but it was an interesting experience. We did a couple of those like sort of stunts. And, but I'm interested to know from your perspective, is that less of a priority? I always hear that like scoops get people to pay. They jump the paywall after a scoop, they gotta read it. Whereas an opinion piece might not, even if it's going viral, people might just summarize it.

Yeah, I mean, we, we did a survey with Wing of top venture capitalists to rank up-and-coming companies, and that does really well. It's like great marketing for us. You know, everybody on the list tweets it out.

Yeah.

But we don't really put much behind a paywall because it's sort of meant to be read. And so then it's not a very good, like, subscription driver. It's more just like brand building awareness influence. And so So really the challenge of any list is are you going to put it behind the paywall? And for the most, most of the time you wouldn't.

Yeah.

Because you want it to get shared. And so I think they're good for brand and like list building, but not great for subscriptions. Whereas putting like documents or behind the paywall, you're going to get this resource of companies that you might invest in or whatever, you know, behind a paywall, you know what you're paying for. And so people are just much more likely to convert. So, you know, when that LP I mentioned earlier did a survey about venture firms, you know, we put that behind a paywall. I think that did very well. So if we're willing to put it behind the paywall, they can do well. But for the most part, the list you're talking about, you know, we keep in front of the paywall.

I feel like there's still— I feel like a lot of people ascribe the value in the Midas List and what Forbes does to just the fact that it's a list and everyone wants to be on it and it has like legacy and brand. And that's real. But underrated is how incredible the photography is in a Forbes feature. You can hire a great photographer and still not hit that level of like magazine cover look. And if you offer that to someone who's gonna win the list, if they understand media and the power of like a really high quality photograph and a photo that will live on and sort of immortalize them, immortalize them for like maybe a decade. You see a lot of people and their top Google result is still that cover that they did when their company hit unicorn status or something. And you're like, wow, they look great there. And then you meet 'em in person and you're like, oh, that was a decade ago. You got some gray hairs now. But offering that as like a trade is an interesting proposition.

Yeah, we literally had like 2 photographers running around our last Silicon Valley event. So I couldn't agree with you more that like getting great photos of these people out of these events—

Something that looks different than just the LinkedIn profile photo against the wall. Something that has action, background, texture. Like, these things are harder to recreate than people think. They take it for granted 'cause they show up everywhere, but they're usually because of a special thing. Nothing's higher status than— the only thing higher status than the Midas list is the Alamy stock photo watermark, Getty Images watermark, at Sun Valley. That is the highest status symbol in Silicon Valley, in my opinion. Yeah. You can't buy it.

I just have one more question. Are you going to voluntarily switch to API-based billing for your AI usage? Because you were getting some—

You're getting some— You're getting some— Ed Zitron, because I'm corrupt for asking?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You said AI was useful. You said—

Great call out. Ed Zitron has this view that journalists shouldn't be getting monthly subscriptions because they're falsely subsidized and we're underwritten. We're not really paying what it costs you to be paying.

Sure, sure, $8,000 for Claude for $200.

I don't think I'm that much of a hyper, like I think Claude and OpenAI, Anthropic and OpenAI are getting a better deal out of me probably than I'm using. I'm not sure I'm getting this arbitrage.

Totally, yeah, you can run those prompts of like, estimate the number of tokens that I've used over the time. And like a lot of people run that and they're like, wow, I've been paying $200 for like $20 worth of tokens. Like they're printing off of me.

Right, right, I think I'm getting had, not the other way around right now.

Yeah. Is AI useful? We'll figure it out eventually. We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out together. Thank you so much for taking the time. This is a ton of fun. Let's do it again soon.

Amazing. So happy to do it.

Well, long live you, Rob. I'm glad we saved this for, you know, today. It's been really fun. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your week.

Later.

Goodbye. Let me tell you about Codex since we're talking about it. Codex is the most tasteful workspace for powerful works best for getting work done tastefully with AI agents, whether you're tastefully writing code, tastefully analyzing data, creating tasteful content, or automating tasteful business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to tasteful.

Usually.

Usually.

Up next, we have Meryl.

This is a scoop. Getting a SpaceX employee on the show is difficult. Not many people can do it, but we can. Because we got Merrill. How you doing?

Rocket man.

Doing great.

Rocket man.

It's good to be back. Rocket man.

Tweet, I wanna go way back in time. Did you ever have the, I wanna work for a rocket company as a kid? I wanna be an astronaut because you sort of wound up pretty close to it.

Oh yeah, I mean, it was, I don't know, I remember watching like that, like do you ever watch that movie October Sky?

Oh yeah, I love that shit.

I remember that was like one of my favorite movies growing up. Of course, definitely. I definitely had like a NASA phase and yeah, so it's, It's kind of crazy. Somebody on Hacker News the other day commented like, it's funny how adding Stack, trying to add StackDiffs to GitHub has resulted in the Graphite team now building Rockets. So here we are.

Yeah, it's remarkable. It's like, it's almost like a side quest in the long arc of history. You'll be deploying on the moon and Mars beyond. How has it been? What has the last couple of weeks been like? Has it been sleepless? Are you able to continue growing the product, building product or has all the news been infiltrating you? Like, what's the psyche been like over the last couple weeks?

Yeah, I mean, it's honestly been really exciting on the ground at Cursor. Like, everybody's fired up about like the compute partnership and what that's unlocking for us on the model training side. We also just had our first big conference, Compile, at Fort Mason yesterday. So the marketing team was really working hard to get everything together for that. And make that a great event. And yeah, it all kind of led up to yesterday being a crazy news day of the SpaceX announcement and then the 3 big feature releases that compiled yesterday, including Origin, the agentic Git Forge that we're working on. Yeah. So yeah, it's been a frenetic past few weeks, but everybody's really fired up.

Did you guys expect the announce, like the sort of second part of the announcement between, you know, the deal between Cursor and SpaceX to get as much like attention as it did, 'cause I was seeing people that seemingly hadn't seen the first, the announcement of like the first part of the deal. And a lot of people felt like they were processing it for the first time.

Sure.

Which kind of makes sense in hindsight. But in our little bubble, I was like, great, like obviously they were gonna do this deal.

Yeah, I sort of had the, I guess I had it in my mind that you already had a SpaceX badge, but that was not the case because this was a partnership and now the deal has been announced. Announced, is that correct?

Yeah, exactly. There was the announcement of the option to acquire and then the other, you know, the announcement yesterday was the exercising of that option. And now, I mean, I still don't have a SpaceX badge yet, you know, we have to wait for the deal to close and then we can actually start working together. But now it's like just the, you know, just antitrust and all the other pieces.

That makes sense. Well, congratulations. I do wanna talk about Origin. Um, walk me through the thesis there. I mean, there's been plenty of gripes about, uh, how much code is getting pushed to the internet generally, how teams are working together, agents are working together. We are in a CPU crunch now. Um, how much of this is just, uh, taking a developer workflow that already exists, speeding it up versus reimagining it from first principles? Like, walk me through that. Yeah. Walk me through the thesis for this product.

Yeah, I think the origin really started from a simple realization, which is that every single piece of the software development lifecycle that we have today, every tool, every piece of infrastructure, was all designed for a world where humans write every line of code.

Yeah.

We've tried to scale that as best we can over the past year or so, but we're really seeing many of those pieces crumbling under the pressure. And first and foremost, just having, making from first principles, designing something that can handle the scale of agentic coding. That's the most important thing is like, is it scalable? Is it reliable? Is it performant? Like, can it handle hundreds of agents working in parallel at once? And that's really what we've designed Origin to be is like the the first example of Git infrastructure that is really built for the agentic era. And the other piece of this is that then building, kind of building on that, if we own the infrastructure, we can start to build it with agents in mind. So it's not just, it doesn't have to be just like the Git objects. It can be, you can start to store agent traces. Mm-hmm. You can see the whole history of every action the agent has taken, everything it referenced, enhanced, and you don't have to have— it's kind of silly today that you'll use one agent to write the PR, but then as soon as the PR is opened, like that agent just goes away.

Disappears, yeah.

It's like, why does that not carry through and help you then, you know, address review comments, resolve CI failures, fix merge conflicts, and really, we want to get to this vision of more like full self-driving PRs that can really bring themselves out to production in many cases without human intervention.

Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I have a bunch of different things there. I guess the question is, yeah, how important is speed in this context? How important is actually the volume of code? You see a lot of these, like someone will post like, okay, I just vibe-coded this, I pushed this change, whatever model they're using did really well. They got the job done. And then somebody will go in and look at the PR and be like, "100,000 lines of code to change the color of the button? Like, this is evidence of slop," or, "This is evidence of poor computer science happening." Do you have a stance on the— is the answer to slop more slop? Are we gonna get less sloppy, more terse in the writing? Is that something that's coming? Or do you need to design a system where the new normal is, yeah, changing the color button, the color might be 10,000 lines of code change. That's fine. Let's also store the reasoning trace and the whole, you know, back and forth and everything that the agent was doing so that, you know, yeah, it was, you know, 10 years of development time for one small change. It's fine because, you know, hard drives are cheap.

Yeah, I certainly don't think that the future is 10,000 lines to change a button color. But I do think that the volume, fundamentally, just the volume of code and the volume, the throughput that we're seeing, all these infrastructure have to handle now is just growing exponentially. And we've seen now a lot of teams are now doing like thousands of pushes per hour. And previously they were doing, tens or hundreds. And that's a lot of what we've been trying to make sure Origin is able to handle is that scale. So we've run some simulations recently where we're doing like, you know, 80 clones and 22 pushes per second with no downtime. And, you know, it is obviously just, this is just like us testing internally, but it shows that like the architecture holds up and it's scalable and it's not yet the, when your agents are ready to work at that speed, origin is not going to be the bottleneck for them. But I do think that we'll then need to— the other thing I think this will enable though is more agentic review, more back and forth, more autonomy and more thinning out of changes and refining of them before a human ever has to look at them. So hopefully we can avoid the case where you have a 10,000-line PR that's doing a meaningless change.

Yeah. How is growth both overall. I feel like a lot of people watch an acquisition happen or a series of acquisitions happen and they're sort of like, okay, like that's the end of the story.

Yeah.

Or they, I mean, it's really easy with Elon Musk to look at it and be like, okay, well like this is an incredibly talented team, but you know, this is data centers in space stuff. This is mass driver on the moon project. Like the main mission is now, you know, not relevant. And so it's less focused, but I imagine that you're just seeing growth in the core business still because teams are still getting up to speed on pushing code and using all these tools. What has growth been like post-acquisition? What have been the big drivers? What does that tell us about the way just the broad software development market is evolving?

Yeah, I mean, we've seen, Since the acquisition, we've seen continued growth in the graphite business itself. But really, I think the most exciting thing for us has been seeing the level of interest from companies of all sizes in what we're doing with Origin. So we set a goal for end of July for waitlist signups that we wanted to hit, and we hit that in the first 20, like the last 24 hours since we announced the product. Amazing.

It's— That gong is also for the acquisition closing, which is maybe a bigger deal than weightless summits. But honestly, like traction on an actual product is probably more relevant than any financial milestone because it means that people are actually interested in this stuff, which is good.

Yeah. It's every time we've talked about it, you know, at Compile yesterday, on customer calls, it's like, you know, Compile got a huge round of applause. Like, it's just, it's so obvious this is a problem that every single company is facing right now, and it's solving this, this burning need. And that's why we're so excited about what we're doing. And, you know, really thinking to your point around acquisitions, like, thinking back to the Graphite days, like, one of the hardest lessons that we learned from building Graphite was that your product is only as good as the infrastructure that it's what it's built on fundamentally. And it might seem obvious, but it's a really hard lesson to learn. And we were always limited by latency, availability, even just UI extensibility. Our customers felt those limits. When our infrastructure was down, we were down too. And it's funny now, there's this whole wave of companies that are going to their favorite agent and saying, copy Graphite's pull request page, make no mistakes. Shipping something out there and they're really quickly finding out like why it's so hard to do what we did. And even then, I think we were never really able to create like the level of experience of just totally seamless, high-performance interface that we wanted to because we were limited by the platform that we built on. So with Origin, you know, now with— Mm-hmm. With the backing of Cursor and the combined team, we're finally, you know, we're now able to truly realize and accelerate the vision that we had from the beginning of the Graphite days.

Let's talk about AI doom, job losses. Is there any risk that AI puts DJing out of businesses? Are DJs going away in our AI future? Or will the DJ, the humble DJ, always have a place in our society? What do you think?

I think there's always, you know, it's always been about more than—

You've actually always been able to just press play on a premixed.

You've always—

And yet we still die.

Like maybe ironically, like a really good white pill for just jobs overall. Yeah. It's like—

Yeah, you wanna see a human up there and—

Even the most, yeah, even the most well-known DJs, like they have like a set. That they could just go up there and play and dance around. And of course, some of them have been accused of that.

But, but, uh, anyway, uh, great to catch up. Congratulations on the progress. Thank you so much for coming.

Really happy for you and the whole team.

What an inspiring story. A true overnight success. That's right, 2020, baby.

Overnight success of 6 years. Yeah, a lot of sleepless nights.

But thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon.

Great to see you, Meryl. Congrats.

Congrats so much. Let me tell you about Railway Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. And our next guest is here with us live in the TBPN UltraDome. We have Connor Ruhm from M13. How you doing?

What's happening, guys? How you doing?

Welcome to the show. We're doing great. Give us your review of the World Cup so far.

Ooh.

Oh, that was definitely the best game in US soccer history. You know, historically, the US has always been competitive, but just could never find the back of the net. So to find the back of the net that many times, that was nothing short of spectacular.

I had a, I had a, I turned it on. I'm watching for like, not like really focused on the game. I think I was like in the middle of something, but I was like, wow, we cannot get the ball on Paraguay's side, like for the life of us. And I realized like I had the, I had the, the, Paraguay's flag look like our jerseys. So we were actually playing quite well. We were pressing them the whole time, but I didn't know. And I was like, oh wow, this is amazing. We're doing great.

Yeah, hopefully the US gets excited. Like we hosted the opening night of the World Cup the night before at our house. And I was texting people going, hey, we're hosting this event for US soccer. They're like, what's coming? I was like, the World Cup. The last time it was in the US was only 32 years ago.

But yeah, we'll see. Come a long way.

Do you track like economic impact from World Cup? Are you reading into it? Some people are saying like that's the reason why we're seeing unemployment so low in a time of disruption. It's like there's a lot of hospitality hiring. Do you read into this stuff?

I don't do a whole lot. I mean, it's interesting both between the World Cup and the Olympics, right? They always put out these studies and the question is, are you losing a shit ton of money or who's making the money? Yeah, I can't I can tell you the car service in Seattle, they're definitely making money. The journey's gonna be $2,500 for a 30-minute trip when I land for Friday's game. So, you know, there are definitely people who make money.

Whoa, whoa, surge pricing?

Exactly. Surge pricing of—

$2,500?

But it's a great economic lesson.

That's what's happening in Vegas for F1. It was the same thing. It's a couple thousand bucks just to have a car take you from your hotel to the event. It was crazy. Anytime that there's huge demand. So, you're thinking more long-term. Take us through the basic thesis for the fund, some of your historical investments. Obviously, seems like you're not thinking quarter to quarter based on unemployment rate data of this month and whether or not the World Cup is causing unemployment to decline or spike. But what is the thesis for the fund? How long have you been doing this?

Yeah. I mean, we started M13 10 years ago. We just celebrated our 10-year anniversary.

Congratulations. Congratulations. Where did the name come from?

Everyone thinks we're El Salvadorian gangsters.

Okay.

Yeah.

MS-13. Sadly, I'm not that gangster. But brightest cluster of stars, brighter than all the stars that comprise it. It's always been our philosophy. We can connect the dots and create more value.

Got it.

But yeah, fast forward 10 years later, we've been the seed or Series A investor in 17 unicorns. So sometimes better to be lucky than good.

Incredible.

On days like last Friday, when we invested in SpaceX at $15 billion and banged out, you know, 150x, you know, we all need more days like that.

That's incredible.

Yeah, thank you for the sound effects. That was well deserved, I think.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and you know, I think, you know, even as we, at some point we'll start talking about AI, everyone thinks like we haven't seen this before. And I think the key is as a VC, you have to learn how to invest in cycles, right? Like we felt like the world was white hot in 2020 and 2021. Turns out it's even hotter now, right? You think about a lot of us like M13 and Threesand, all of us, we are investing in consumer software, social media, things like ridesharing. That was the implication of the technological breakthrough, which was the iPhone, right? Mm-hmm. And so there's always kind of these ripples. And so yeah, now, you know, we got 35 people, offices, New York, San Francisco, LA, always trying to think think what is that next ripple? What is that implication of that technology? How do we invest where the world is bending? And, you know, I think SpaceX is a great example. You invest in outlier people who could create outlier companies and you hope you take enough shots on goal that sometimes, you know, you get those, those big outcomes.

SpaceX, Ring, Matterport. You're not afraid of hardware. Where'd that come from? What's your thesis on hardware? Enabled technology companies going forward?

Yeah, I mean, like take AI today, right? Like my housekeeper knows it's gonna change the world, right? That is not, that takes no skill.

Yeah.

The skill of a VC is to understand where to get the best risk and probability adjusted outcome, right? Sure. And to do that, you gotta find the right value layers, right? So yes, foundational models are enormous. They also come at high prices with a lot of competition. The thing I talk about all the time these days is if you think about the last cycle around consumer software, social networks, it was innovators competing with innovators, right? Zuck competing with Evan, John Zimmer competing with Travis. I would argue in this cycle, it's innovators competing with innovators who are now competing with the most well-funded innovators on the planet.

You got Google, Microsoft.

Well, even before then you got OpenAI and Anthropic, right?

Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Then you have the 10 biggest tech companies in the world. And I would argue for the first time in history, they actually have the advantage, right? They got the tech, the talent, the data. The capital and the technical expertise.

Google entering AI feels very different than Google entering social networking.

For sure. Right. And so, and so when you think about this market, you really got to think long and hard about where do you get that exposure to AI? Where are the value layers? Right. We invested in a company called Prepared, you know, in the very early days. It sold earlier this year for about $900 million. It was using AI and technology to disrupt 911. Thank you. 911 call centers, right?

Sure, sure, sure.

They had no competition all that—

Hopefully not disrupt— oh, disrupt the call centers. Not disrupt the actual practice of making calls.

It turns out 911 was still using landlines. The rest of us just weren't calling using a landline. So, you know, simple stuff like that. So, in this market, right, it's all about, like, where— and I think in venture, right, the multistage funds play a different game than someone like us, right? We invest out of a $400 million early-stage fund, One, we're playing for alpha, right? And so we're pure-play seed, Series A specialists. And so you gotta be disciplined about how you enter, what the competition is, things like that.

So where does the capital come for doing SpaceX at $15 billion? Obviously a fantastic investment, but not in that sweet spot of seed, Series A, right?

Yeah, yeah, our first fund, to be fair, was kinda stage agnostic.

Okay, yeah.

But I think a lot of it is, look, all the letters are fungible. The way we think about it at M13 is there's only two types of companies in this market, those trying to find product-market fit and those who found it who are hyperscalers, right? Sure. And so at the end of the day, you're looking for venture-scale returns. And then, you know, the thing that we talk about all the time is everyone just says venture's risky and they kind of throw up their arms. That's like kind of true. But if you're trying to colonize Mars, that is riskier than if you're trying to get someone to order a black car on an app. Right? So there are different spectrums of risk. And so it's always, you know, trying to figure out, is the risk worth the reward? And that's the game of venture.

Have you been disappointed in the growth of the LA ecosystem?

Yeah. I mean, I laugh because I remember people telling me that San Francisco was dead 3 years ago. Turns out it's a little less dead than expected. The way I describe LA is right now, it's It's having a siesta, right?

Yeah.

Taking a little nap, kind of like in Spain between 1 and 3 PM. We can't forget, you know, about $450 billion of enterprise value was created outside of some of the big ones like SpaceX in the last cycle, right? And so you think about this cycle, right now we're still talking about the technology, AI. There's no doubt that's going to come from the technologists sitting in San Francisco. But, you know, you guys know other industries. When you think about You think about the second and the third wave, there's no doubt in my mind some of that will come from LA, right? Nobody understands media content creators. It's why you guys are sitting in LA. Yeah. You're the best in the game at that, right? And so I think it's too early to count out LA, just like it was too early 3 years ago to count out San Francisco. Yes, there were a lot of needles on the street and it was pretty red, everybody was leaving, but like, yeah, it came roaring back. So I think as you think about it, about what are the new business models we're not even thinking about because of AI? What are those ripples? There's no doubt some of them will be coming from this.

Yeah, it's interesting. I am bullish on the South Bay. Gundo? El Segundo, South Bay broadly. Continue to be bearish on like LA, actually LA, the city. Like it's hard for me to imagine, I can't imagine a $100 billion company coming out Venice, Santa Monica, West Hollywood, places like that, which is, it's painful to me, but I think it's the reality. Would love to be proven wrong. Hopefully I haven't passed on that company yet.

Yeah.

But yeah, it's interesting that like, it feels like the South Bay is like really working. El Segundo is really working, you know, SpaceX starting in an El Segundo warehouse, like that's all working, but I feel like the original like LA startup movement, can't even claim—

Silicon Beach, never mind.

Yeah, can't claim that.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't think you'll find a $100 billion company coming out of LA. I think you might find some $10 to $20 billion companies. And the reason I say that is, you know, the $100 billion company, the trillion-dollar companies are going to be foundational models and things like that.

Concentration of talent.

Yeah, I think you'll find that the application layers. Like, there's a reason Snap is here, and there's a reason Tinder was founded here and stuff like that.

I know, but it's painful that like Suno, Suno should have been an LA company.

That should have been an LA company.

Right? Like, and it's what, like Boston, New York, maybe they have an SF office, I forget what.

But I think like the DreamWorks of AI, like it has to happen in LA maybe, but it won't be 100%.

Yeah, maybe, but yeah, it's hard to imagine it as like—

Yeah, from LA, like New York is the home of like the on the street, what do you do for a living TikTok, or like the person that's playing the drums and streaming that, like so many of the, like the internet democratizing content and then the competition from Atlanta, Toronto, and international. There's the big, we were just reading about the director of the Avengers, hugely successful, very successful filmmaker, obviously, in the Disney portfolio, is moving to London, because they're doing the next round of Marvel films out there. And so, yeah, we just lost like a whole pool of talent here.

By the way, Jordi, I was gonna tell you, I'm very jealous that you live in Malibu, since my house burned down in Malibu.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I miss that ocean breeze.

In last year, or 2018?

Last year, yeah. Wow.

Brutal.

I told my wife the night before we went to bed, she was really panicked, I was like, sweetie, We literally live across the street from the firehouse, and like not far from Nobu. Trust me, our house isn't burning down. Obviously, we were wrong, and we're still the lucky ones. A lot of people were way less lucky. But man, I miss that beach breeze.

Are you going to rebuild?

Yeah, I'm going to start this fall.

OK. So we'll see you in 10 years.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, hopefully the permitting goes faster or something. I don't know. It seems like a rough, rough go also in the Palisades.

How are you thinking about consumer investing, like consumer products?

Yeah, you know, like 2.5 years ago at our LP Day, we talked about how we thought for the first time in probably 4, 5, 6 years that we thought AI would make the application layer more interesting 'cause we've been doing a lot of the underpinnings, right? We invest in the future of money, work, health, commerce. So that is a pretty high swath, but we are doing mostly infrastructure stuff. I think we've been right on that. It's hard to get the application layer around AI. Just things are so frothy and moving so quickly. I do think— I don't know if it'll be for us anymore, just given the size of our funds. I do believe the next billion-dollar D2C brands will be built as AI companies that happen to sell a product, right? Yeah. The reason guys like us did so many, you know, D2C things and then stopped doing it was at one point the mass the math made sense, right? You could create unicorns of the math. As the cost of Facebook acquisition increased, right? The math no longer made sense. I think for the first time in history, the math will make sense here for the next 2 to 3 years. The reality for M13 is we need generational companies when you operate out of a $400 million fund. So I don't know if it will—

Yeah, it's tough. Even if you're doing a true you can do 2 on 10, and then it's a billion-dollar exit, and like, you're like, "OK, it doesn't actually— can't return the fund." Yeah.

That's the problem. Like, most people just don't think about the math of venture. It's great to say, "Oh, I had this exit or that," but yeah, you need— at M13, we always say every check in the base case has to return half the fund, so we need $3 to $5 billion companies in the base case, and we have to hope, you know, we have companies like OpenFX doing stablecoins, or we need to find that next SpaceX, and you need to find those decacorns. That's the only way the math works.

Sure. What's the team structure like? $2 billion under management now, $400 million fund. That feels like enough room for some principals, some VPs around the table, but what's your philosophy to growing the firm?

Yeah. So, my brother and I founded the firm. Obviously, Basically, the way we talk about it is we wanted to build the venture firm that a founder would have built for themselves. So every single person is an operator by background. In fact, we only have one person that's ever worked at a VC. That's either crazy or that's by design, right? In our model, you know, basically some of those operators now invest for a living, right? And so that's the typical venture model. We say they're accountable for company picking, right? Obviously we've historically been good with 17 unicorns at that, but they're trying to find where's the TAM, where's these great founders. We have a large— a team called our Propulsion Team. They are former operators who actually don't invest for a living. They actually stay as operators, right?

Right.

But now, instead of operating over a single company, they operate over a portfolio. And, you know, we've backed, I think, 11 previous unicorn founders in the last 2 funds. These aren't people that need help., but where we invest at the early stages, a seed or Series A, they're not going to have a head of data and a head of talent and a head of product. And so we can use these very experienced operators. Like, we have guys like Carl Alammar, who has built DigitalOcean from pre-revenue to a $5 billion IPO. He now reminds me, I think it's $19 billion today. So he tells me, stop talking about $5. But having a guy like that be able to fill in the gaps, look around, corners for you at that Series A is incredibly valuable. So yeah, so we have about 12 people that deploy the capital, you know, a handful of partners, like you said, some, you know, I think for us, we obsess about our junior talent 'cause those are our rising stars. You know, too many VC firms are a bunch of usually males that have had success and kind of hold on. I think you need the best 22-year-old kid from Stanford who can comp sci. Agreed. I think you need be the best 32-year-old. You know, I'm going to find the next unicorn founder because I probably had dinner with them last week, but I'm probably not going to find the 22-year-old kid who just dropped out of Stanford and did that. It's probably going to come from one of the junior people on the team. And so in everything we do, we always say we didn't want to create a better VC. We kind of wanted to create a different type of VC. Mm-hmm. And so we take cues from the best of the best and then think about, again, if we were a founder building a VC, how would we build it?

How do you think the SpaceX IPO is gonna impact the luxury real estate market?

Oh, I am so fascinated by this. I would love your thoughts, man.

Well, I'm just looking, I'm thinking about YC and how there's a lot of new centimillionaires and there's not a lot of inventory over there. And knowing SpaceX people, they like to be outdoors, a lot of them probably like to ski a little bit. And I think there might be a supply-demand mismatch, at least at YC, but we'll see.

Yeah, maybe we should, your house in Malibu, my house in YC, we try to get a premium for it, get some Anthropic or OpenAI stock or blend it, you know?

Oh yeah, you can sell your house for stock now.

Yeah, seriously. But I mean, I think it's gonna be absolutely fascinating, right? Because you think about when OpenAI an Anthropic IPO, a bunch of VCs are gonna make a ton of money.

Yeah.

But those people's investors are endowments, institutional pensions, things like that. When you think about SpaceX, right? It is every guy in YPO. It is every guy at the country club.

Sure.

It is every guy at Burning Man.

Oh, sure.

Right? Even if they did 150x like we did, they 10x, they 5x. Yeah.

So you got in some SBEs.

Right?

You think about it like there has never been this this much value return that was literally 80% in SPVs, right? And so I think it's fascinating because some guy just made $3 million, some guy just made $100 million, some guy just made a billion.

And so I think it's gonna be—

Not to mention, you know, the team specifically.

Yeah, and the team. Yeah, it was interesting.

I saw a whole family with SpaceX IPO shirts. And I was like, I don't know that they're like bankers. I don't know that they were at the IPO on the inside. I think they just like got in early, made some money.

Yeah.

And now they're really proud and they're part of like the retail army essentially.

But I think it will be good for venture. I mean, I think there's no doubt planes, houses, private schools, country clubs, all of those things, right? And we should talk about coupling our houses together. We could get a premium. You get two for one.

I mean, that's an efficient trade.

The starter pack.

The starter, the starter Centillion AmeriPack. You get Malibu and YC all in one transaction. But I do think it's just good for venture. In general, right? Because people have realized these things just take a long time, right? Like we invested $15 billion and still took 10 years to return capital. So I do think it shows people in success, right? Although these things take a long time, that is a lot of money coming back to the system.

Yeah.

Any last questions? We gotta hop on with AWS in just a second.

No, let's do it again soon.

This is great.

And yeah, well feel free to call in from a World Cup game or something.

All right, you guys going to any of them?

I don't have anything scheduled.

Nothing scheduled yet.

Who knows, we may get FOMO at the last second and try and get in. Yeah, we'll see how it progresses. Is it as crazy as the Knicks tickets? Is it $100,000 to go or is it more reasonable if you just wanna see the game?

More reasonable.

More reasonable, okay. But it can get crazy. I mean, I'm sure if it's like, you know—

Well, you're telling everybody about it.

Yeah, I'm telling everybody.

Now the prices are gonna go crazy.

Buy it right during the next commercial break.

Anyway, thank you. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thank you, Austin. Appreciate it.

This is fantastic.

Thanks, Patrick.

We'll talk to you soon.

Talk soon.

And then we will tell everyone about Figma Agents. Meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Very excited to be partnered with Figma. And we are also excited to have Dr. Swami Siva Subramanian from AWS. He is the VP of Agentic AI and he is here with us from the TVP and Ultra Dome. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.

Welcome back. I'm great. Hey, thanks for having me.

Thanks for hopping on. Why don't we start with a little bit of an introduction since it is the first time you're on the show. Tell us a little bit about how you fit into the AWS organization, what you're working on, and then we can go into Agentic AI.

Yeah, I mean, I'm the Vice President of Agentic AI. I've been with AWS now for like 20 years, created various products things from like our database.

Hold on. What was it like 20 years ago? I feel like AWS is barely 20 years old. Were you like the first person on the team? You and Andy were hanging out and racking servers?

Kind of. Actually, literally AWS would fit in a single conference room, if you can believe it.

That's amazing.

And I mean, I joined as an intern. My internship project was to build a database called Dynamo.

No.

So, and I mean, that turned out to be a bit of a success. So they gave me a job back.

That's great.

And then I started the database, joined the database team, started a bunch of databases, then moved on to analytics and started AI for AWS.

Okay.

And now that you see all the things with Bedrock and SageMaker, all the, AI tools. Now, as the world is moving more agentic, I kind of spun myself out of what I was doing to focus all in on AI agents. So that's kind of my background.

Yeah, I imagine that, you know, the, the typical database business, the analytics business, all that is growing, but it's being driven by more agentic AI use. Talk about the new releases, the new launches, and I want to know how do we compare and contrast, continue them from context. Where— how do companies use the right tool for the job here?

Yeah, I mean, first of all, we live in some amazing times with AI agents because the art of possible has fundamentally changed. But when you look at it, even now, where you see actually enterprises are struggling today, first of all, on putting agents to work, they are still stuck in this world of— I call it the wall gardens— where they are stuck into bottlenecks, where If I go on vacation or even when I go to sleep and wake up, I get signals from like my Outlook to Slack to various other messaging tools. So the time I spent to even catch up used to be like crazy, like at least an hour before I know I get to my job. So why, why was it that case? It's not like we didn't have AI assistants in every one of these tools, but what was missing was it didn't have the context to fill in the spaces. Mm-hmm. Between these various tools. So that's why today actually we launched something called Quick Autonomous Agent. It actually works on your behalf. It gathers all the context across tools. So there is no more wall gardens, but it still has something enterprises love. It has built-in governance and security. That's why the likes of GoDaddy to NBA to everybody is using it. You are showing it live today. I know. And the art of possible, even when we demoed it live, people couldn't believe it because now you can actually catch up and generate a PowerPoint deck in a matter of minutes to a detailed dashboard when you talk to your data lake and generate insights. All these things are changing. That is one example of bottleneck we are removing. The second one I talked about was in the world of security. Security is a big area where intersection of how software is getting built and security is changing in a big way because, yes, the rate of change in how you can generate code is becoming very, very cheap.

Mm-hmm.

But also the risk on security is also becoming big.

Mm-hmm.

So speed and security are almost at a trade-off in every organization. So what we launched today is a service called Continuum. Yeah, in many ways the approach behind it is make security not a discrete thing companies do. It's like how antibodies actually fight viruses, always on, continuously fighting is the way we thought about it as well, as an example.

Yeah, I want to dig deeper into those like continuously running AI agents. I think when people think agentic AI, they go to coding agents because everyone's had the magical experience with those and seen the impact and the spend and the token maxing that happens when you deploy AI agents across a huge workforce of knowledge workers, heavily software engineers. But I'm more interested in, in the less understood agentic workflows that are happening maybe deeper and autonomously in a business, and I'm trying to get to a world where I have that case study at the tip of my tongue for every time I book a flight, it runs an Agentic workflow to make sure that my seat on the plane is correct. Or I don't know, I don't know how to contextualize it, but I know it's happening and I know you're seeing it. So walk me through some of the Agentic workflows or Agentic AI work that's happening, even if no one shows up to the office. Yeah. It's a company holiday and there's still tokens being spent. What does that look like? What is the shape of that work?

Actually, I mean, that is one of the key things that we are going to start seeing, explosion of agents in a big way. Even today, for instance, you, in your summit, the CIO of Southwest Airlines talked about how they are building agents on top of actually Agentcore, which is our core agent platform service. And they were able to build these amazing new capabilities to do things like crew planning and various others. These are not like where humans are just generating codes, but how— that's where they are going. 3M, for instance, are using agents to now be able to do more efficient sales call planning. GoDaddy is able to actually leverage some of our quick agents to automatically reduce something like 15,000 hours of manual work that they are able to do. These are like examples of agents, again, not created just for purely creating software, but these are agents running under the hood and they are able to produce value. And this is going to be where the next big agent workload is going to happen in many ways. And that's what we are excited.

What, what is demand like for model routing these days? AWS is fascinating because you've sort of, maybe it's brilliant by design, but sort of the Switzerland of AI in the sense that there's partnerships with Anthropic, OpenAI, there's a whole bunch of other foundation models that are available on AWS. Yeah. What is demand like? Obviously different teams have different preferences and cost trade-offs and they might say, I want to be with this particular Claude model or this particular GPT model. Other companies might just say, I never want to be caught using a frontier model for something that doesn't need frontier spend. So optimize it for me. Is that something that you're seeing demand for already?

Yeah, I mean, first of all, I think for the industry itself, when I started Bedrock, one of the things We were different compared to everybody else's. We always had this belief no single model will rule the world. This was not a popular belief at that time, but, but now it seems so obvious. But then amazing thing is now that you are in Switzerland, as you actually speak, in Q1 alone, the adoption for our Bedrock generative AI LLM platform, what we are starting to see is in Q1 alone, And the amount of workload, that request rate that we are seeing is greater than all of the previous years combined. That is the amount of growth we are seeing.

So crazy.

And it seems to have no signs of slowing down. It's because the rate of actually adoption, especially as people are moving from proof of concepts to production, is just accelerating because they are seeing real outcomes. And that is one of the reasons why so much of innovation is going into things like Bedrock and Agent Core, not just on the model front, but also how we are supporting the things like disaggregated inference and all the agent capabilities such as launching new contexts. So these are the capabilities that's going to make actually enterprises move from just cute prototypes that are sitting in where they demo to their execs, to actually production to see real value. And this is why I do think there is so much upside in the future.

How do you think about AWS as a sort of like a thought leader for enterprises rolling these features out? I'm just thinking about like, we're going through this transition of like, there's a new technology, you need to use it effectively. I feel like a big piece of why AWS was so successful was because it powered Amazon.com. And if it's good enough for Amazon.com, it's good enough for my business or whatever I'm doing. And it feels like now there's an opportunity for AWS to sort of set the agenda on what, it's not token maxing, it's not token minimizing, it's token optimizing, it's ROI maxing or something like that. But how are you communicating to your team, to the teams within AWS, in AWS about how to use AI effectively? Sometimes you just want to get everyone up to speed, just go and test everything. And then sometimes you want to be, you know, setting a tone that a company that says, "Hey, look, we don't have a lot of free cash flow here to throw at this new hot technology. If we're gonna use something, it has to deliver ROI almost immediately." How are you carrying that through your organization and into the companies that partner with AWS?

Yeah, so, I mean, it's a great question because if you look at the industry, and this is true even at Amazon, we first started with everyone should get familiar with these tools. So we were trying to get everyone to adopt so that they know how to use these tools. Now that they have become so familiar, we are now making all the tools available between like Kiro, our agent-to-code coding solution, to Cloud Code, to Quick, our business user productivity solution. Within Amazon itself, tools like Quake is used by hundreds of thousands of people, let alone KeyRoad to many others equally on the software development. Now we have come to a point where we internally, and this is true for our external customers such as Delta and Southwest and many others as well as, we give organizational breakdown. Within Amazon, we say, hey, every VP and under that team, how much usage is happening, what is their cost breakdown, and then we roll it out. This is true for Qero and pretty soon it will be true for Quake. And within Bedrock, which is our GenAI platform service, we actually integrated with the AWS Cost Explorer so that we can actually have people spend— I mean, monitor the spend in terms of where at a per-user level, per-model level. On a per-organization level too. The moment you have visibility, then you know where people are spending, then you can understand ROI. In fact, the interesting thing what we saw was that my teams, and there are a few teams in Amazon, I call them frontier teams. These are teams that don't see 50% productivity improvement, they see 10x to 20x productivity improvement. Mm-hmm. And when you see their bill on token, It's not actually like $100,000 a month. It's actually, even in the Kiro credits, it's something like around $2,000 to $3,000 a month. That's not that much for 10x to 20x productivity.

Yeah.

But I do think this is going to keep going as the world becomes more and more agent tech because once they move to coding to be just launched our release agent, 'cause you increase code velocity. Everyone talks about coding, but this is the mess. Suddenly then everything gets stuck because you need to deploy it to real world and deploying it to real world is a bigger challenge because you can't just increase the volume by 10x here and the deployment is going at 1x. That means everything becomes a technical debt. So we made that agent tech and then we made pen testing agent tech.

Mm-hmm.

So I almost jokingly call it saying like, hey, you need to write it correct, ship it fast, and constantly keep it modern. And the only way to do it is you need to have all of it be done by agents. And that's exactly how we are now moving towards.

Makes sense. Well, thank you for coming on the show. Congratulations on the launches and hope to talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your week. Thank you.

We'll talk to you soon. Thanks again for having me.

Of course.

Great to have you. Cheers.

Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlocks seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Our next guest is already in the waiting room, so we'll bring in Tomás Suárez from Raven Renaissance. He's the founder, CEO, and CTO.

Boom.

What you got on your face? Introduce yourself, tell us about what you're building. I'm very excited for this.

Cool, hey guys. Yeah, it's great to be here. Yeah, so I'm Tom, the founder of Raven Residence. We're a team of engineers and designers who have been building and wearing customized AR devices for years and decades. So we're working on Raven Prism, which is the first ambient computer in the form of glasses.

Okay. Did you launch this on Monday knowing that the specs announcement was happening? Was that somewhat intentional or just kind of random?

So it was actually more of a preview. So we are doing our full launch later this year, but we were gonna be at the conference anyway and we figured we would show some of our hardware and software.

Yeah, because it's Augmented World. It's a conference for augmented reality generally. Do you like that term, or is that term getting stale at this point?

I think it's interesting. Augmented reality is kind of a loaded term in some ways because there have been so many devices over the years. But I think for us, the term ambient computing feels really right because it's about technology being there when you need it and gone out of the way when you don't. And I think that's kind of what this device is for. I wore Google Glass for many years, and, you know, of course, there's a lot of baggage that comes with that, but there are lots of wearable computers that have tried these sorts of things over years, and I think finally the industry is starting to converge on something that makes a lot of sense for daily wear.

Yeah. How are you positioning the product? What are the key stats that you're particularly proud of? Everyone talks about price, weight.

Well, maybe even before that, like, I wanna know about your product, but like, in your view over the last few years as you've been using these products, developing them, like, what is the ideal product? What does it do? What are, is like, should we be thinking, we were debating earlier, just like, do we need to be thinking about like killer use cases, like specific things people do every day or do, you know, a lot of the specs demos, there were some of the things that were being demoed, I was like, okay, that would be cool. Like, I'd maybe do that once a year, right? Like measuring like a room, like how a piece of furniture would fit in. That alone is like even if it's 10 times better than using like a measuring tape or something like that, that's not going to get me to like, you know, be a daily user of something like this. So like, how have you been thinking about like what is the ideal product? Because I assume that's that's what you're building towards.

Exactly. Yeah, so as someone who wore this for over 12 years, I can say that— or not this particular product, but of course, wearables in general.

Time traveler here.

I wish. I wish. There are two main categories of use cases that I think are really relevant. The first is microinteractions. So this is something where you're in and out of the display within 5 to 10 seconds. So this is things like— like next navigation direction, a notification that comes in, which sounds really distracting, but it's actually really nice to not have to pull your phone out of your pocket. Changing your music, all that sort of stuff, even next cooking instruction, whatever, those are microinteractions in and out in 5, 10 seconds or less. The other one is reference material. And so this is where you can AirPlay your phone screen up. You can pin up reference, contextually relevant information. So if you have something that you're working on hands-free, you— or with your hands, you want something that is hands-free that's going to give you that information. And ideally, you can ask an LLM or ask an AI to help you with that task. So those are the two categories of experience that we think about as being really necessary. There's also a third one, which is spatial experiences, which is what we've seen from SPECS. And I think— I mean, certainly, there's a lot of spatial work that we want to do in the future as well. But I think right now, It's kind of like you want to build toward, you know, what is the iPod of AR before you build the iPhone? And we really need to get something out that, you know, is a nice form factor that's lightweight that people are going to actually want to wear.

How do you think about field of view? I'm sort of split on it. I used to be FOV maxer. I used the HoloLens and was like, "This is unacceptable." Tried the Apple Vision Pro, it's much better. But then when I think about the Call of Duty experience Duty HUD, the Meta Ray-Ban displays. I'm like, actually for a lot of those micro interactions, next turn direction, next cooking instructions, something like that, like just put the information right there. It's fine. It's hands-free. I'm actually maybe fine with a smaller FOV if everything's designed around that constraint from, and it's not trying to be omnipresent.

Yeah, so field of view is an interesting one because there's a couple different ways to think of field of view. One is in, you know, absolute number of degrees diagonal on your vision. And typically, these devices are, you know, if you go to the really big VR headsets, you're going to be closer to 100 degrees. Something like this, this is actually 30 degrees. But that's actually a lot of space. That is equivalent to a 16-inch MacBook at arm's length.

Okay.

Which is a lot of space, especially if you have a high PPD. So we find that it's actually field of view and pixels per degree.

Okay.

And if you have a high pixels per degree, you have high resolution. Resolution, which means that if you have a high pixels per degree but a low FOV, then you actually end up with something that is akin to laptop in front of you. And so when we think about, like, this device is Linux-based, it allows you to SSH in. You can run pretty much any application that will run on ARM64, which is, of course, the same architecture as Mac. And so you can run properly as a computer.

OK, world locked versus head locked. I feel like one of the problems the HoloLens was that everything was world locked and you turn your head and the narrow FOV would clip the sphere that you put there and all of a sudden you're looking at a half sphere and it draws your attention as opposed to if it's just head locked, like the screen stays where it's put and it leans in and it does the best that it can with a limited FOV.

Yeah, so it also depends on, I think the world lock makes sense for those spatial experiences. Again, you need the large field of view.

Yeah.

For something like a head-up display, I don't think World Lock makes much sense. You really just need something that— there's all sorts of tricks that you can do in the human-computer interaction. For example, if you have edges on the screen, then it's obvious that you're clipping. But if you allow some padding, any pixels that are black are actually rendered as transparent. So any black pixels around your icons and things like that are going to appear in screen space. Is transparent, which is the way we think about it.

How much is capital a constraint? 'Cause you're competing with companies that are willing to throw billions of dollars at this problem, and so far, I don't necessarily think it's getting them that much closer than—

It used to be, for any hardware company, it was like, oh, you'll need $5 million to do that, and now it's like, oh yeah, no problem. All the tooling's cheap and stuff, and you can— outsource the whole supply chain if you need to.

Also, it's never been easier to raise $5 million.

Yeah, exactly. Like even a big number, oh, we're going to get $100 million. It's like, yeah, there's going to be 20 of those raises this month.

So it's interesting. When we started this company, a lot of investors told us that it was going to cost, you know, it's going to be over $100 million to bring this product from idea to design, you know, early design, EVT, DVT, PVT, whatever, all the validation stages and up to mass production. We're going to be shipping later this summer. To the first batches, and then we're launching later this year officially. But yeah, we've done it with under 8 figures.

Wow.

And a lot of the— and actually, there are a lot of smart glasses. We consider it— it's kind of a different category, the ambient computing. But there are a lot of smart glass companies that will go to kind of an ODM, typically in China or somewhere else, and they'll take a reference design. That's not what we've done. We've actually— we're manufacturing in the US. We do source components from all over, of course, but we do all design in our lab in San Francisco. We build the batches. This unit was actually built in our lab in San Francisco, assembled, and we think that's really important, especially for rapid iteration. That is one of the ways that we've been able to, with a very small team, iterate quickly and get to a product that we're really proud of.

How are you thinking of marketing messaging sort of to bring it back to that idea of like the killer use case, it feels like a lot of these pitches that we see for VR, XR, AR headsets, like they get a little scattered and all of a sudden they're trying to be 25 different things. A lot of the demos don't, if you're not a golfer, do you care about the golf thing? But I imagine that you get some of that flexibility for free by layering on top of it on top of AI because if you're a front door to AI and everyone knows, oh yeah, AI can do knowledge retrieval, it can also write code, it can also generate images, then you're like, oh, you don't need to explain that. You can just say this is a better way to interface with any AI front door or any AI system. But how are you thinking about like the marketing messaging focusing that in or is it more valuable to pitch like broad developer platform, like who is the audience? Yeah. Core customer?

Yeah, so I think there have been plenty of devices that have tried pitching the developer, like, "This is a dev kit, dev kit, dev kit." And that's not really that useful because you get developers who get it and they play with it. They might go on a shelf for the next few years. And really, in order for a device like this, even a dev kit, to be useful, there has to be something in it, like some killer app. And so people ask us all the time, what's the killer app of AR? You know, there's a, this interesting question, 'cause what was the killer app of the iPhone?

The phone.

It actually is dependent on, yeah, it's true, but it's dependent on.

Yeah, well, my take on the iPhone is that when Steve Jobs introduced it, it was a phone, an iPod, and an internet communicator, basically a web browser. And that was the killer app. And then the App Store came in the future revisions, and then you got Uber and DoorDash and all the games games and stuff, but it was enough on day one that you were like, "Well, I've been carrying a phone. This is a sleeker looking phone. I'll replace it." And so whenever I go to VR, AR, I'm always like, "This should be a replacement for my, you know, 24-inch monitor that I plug my laptop into," or it should be a replacement for a home theater or a 65-inch TV or another screen because in many ways it is just another screen. So are you replacing the smartwatch? Are you replacing the phone? Are you replacing the iPad? Like, you gotta sort of laser in instead of just trying to be something that's like entirely net new. It's hard. Like, like the AirPods were headphones first, you know?

The other thing with glasses that's interesting is just how many, how many hundreds of millions or billions of people like already rely on glasses to see.

Yeah.

So that's a market where it's much less of a, you're not actually selling them a new device. You're selling them the same thing that they rely on plus a computer built into it, which like—

I think a lot of people like the Meta Ray-Ban displays specifically to use for phone calls and for just music. Like they'll just, oh yeah, I'm going for a walk in the park and I'll just take these and play music on these instead of headphones. And it's like, then you can get into the, you know, Meta Ray-Ban displays and like interface and all that other stuff, but I would imagine the majority of the time is spent like taking a couple photos, pretty basic, everyone has a phone, but this is a little bit easier, and listening to calls and listening to music, but yeah.

Yeah, there's certainly, I mean, there's a lot of use cases, particularly for technical creatives. So certainly developers, engineers, but also musicians and filmmakers, and there's that kind of niche is what we're going after at first, and then of course it kind of becomes becomes a more mass-market consumer after that. We also have enterprises that are interested, and we have some enterprise customers as well, 'cause we designed for a very strict set of design constraints on consumer, and then, you know, translates to enterprise. But one of the, there is a couple other things that we, you know, we care really deeply about, you know, not only Linux architecture, which, you know, we're to our knowledge the only ones kind of with this type of device doing that, but also all-day power. So we have these guys on the back. This is called Raven Prism, and then these are the Raven Wings. Wings, as the Raven Wings just come off. And this is actually an expansion port, not only for the hot-swappable battery system, where you can take both batteries off and you can get all-day power, but also for future modules. So we're going to release an HDK later this year so people can actually start building their own hardware modules on it. And then the other thing is privacy. I think one of the challenges that this industry has faced is particularly around the camera, but also with just user data in general. Yeah. Easy for us, we're in San Francisco, to remember, oh, yeah, everyone's going to be OK with this. But people are often not OK with all of the privacy implications of this. And we're seeing a lot of backlash on certain devices. So a couple of things that we do is we actually have a physical camera cover on here. So you have to take that off in order to use the camera. And it allows you to have this— basically, to alert other around you when the camera's in use. And then there's a lot of advanced cryptography that we do kind of at the lowest levels of the stack as well, and make sure that user data's protected. And we've had a pretty positive response to that so far.

That's great. How many years until a billion AR or augment, what did you call it? What was the—

Billion DAUs of glasses, smart glasses.

Smart glasses.

Broadly.

It's hard to predict. There's an industry saying that AR has been 2 years away every year for the past 30 years. And it's kind of true. So I don't think I could fully predict it. I think it's reasonable. I mean, Meta has been shipping a ton of devices. It's kind of growing the industry, which is really nice. I think it's reasonable to say that we'll at least be in the millions per year— or we are in millions per year, but I think we'll be in the tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions per year in about 4 or 5 years. And then a billion daily active users could be 10 years away. It could be less. It's really hard to say.

Yeah, but I can tell that you're running, just from the short conversation, that you're running the company to make sure that you are in business with a fantastic product. When that moment happens. Like, I was looking at the, you know, the SPACs, just looking at the reaction to the SPACs launch, and like, Spiegel and Snapchat are in a unique position in that they can kind of just ignore what shareholders, you know, think about their— where they invest. But that being said, like, it's hard to think about them spending another $3.5 billion, you know, on this effort, or just given than how I expect the product to be received in its current form. So I think if you're set up to keep burn low, really, really keep iterating, actually using the product all day long, which you must have used the product, you must have used AR glasses more than anyone else on the planet, I imagine. I don't know anyone. We know a lot of people that love technology. I don't know anyone that's been like a sort of like DAU for this long.

Yeah.

But I think that's like, what it's going to take to make a product that people will actually use every day.

For sure. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It really— you need the firsthand experience because there's a lot of design decisions that happen for mobile that are not clear for this type of device. And so there's no replacement for just using it every day. And there's— yeah, it's very important.

How on earth can you do eye tracking in those? You really do eye tracking in those?

Yeah. So actually, so this device that I'm wearing, this is— these are the same kind of form factors. It's just kind of final materials, right? But there's actually two little cameras in there.

That's crazy.

There's one there, and there's one there. And those are hooked up to a separate kind of coprocessor, which is on the other side, which is also for privacy. So the main SoC never sees the raw camera images, but that coprocessor takes in the data from the eyes. And then we have some models that give a gaze vector over to the SoC.

That's remarkable. I was convinced that anything with internal eye tracking like that was gonna weigh, you know, 600 grams, 1,000 grams for a really long time. Not anymore.

Not anymore.

Well, congratulations.

We're doubling down on it. I love it. Yeah, we're pretty excited for people to try it 'cause it's quite a magical experience.

Yeah, yeah, we're very excited for you.

Really great to meet you and come back on whenever you want to, whenever you have stuff to talk about.

We'll talk to you soon.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we're gonna be doing a launch in San Francisco next few months, so.

Amazing, amazing. Congrats, we'll talk to you soon.

Congrats on the progress.

Have a good one. Thanks.

Goodbye.

Let me tell you about Console.com. Console builds AI agents that Automates 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. We got the Germinator in the waiting room. Mark Gurman, how you doing?

I miss you.

Hey, what's going on, guys?

We miss you. We miss you too.

I miss you so much. Especially when the news is like it's been and everything I read reminds me of you.

Oh yeah? Indeed. That's funny.

I see Siri, I see Apple, I see Apple Foundation models, I see everything. I just think the Germinator.

Okay, have you recovered? Was last week exhausting? How are you feeling?

No, last week was good. Yeah, it was an interesting conference. I'm glad they were able to keep the keynote time down to under an hour and a half. It was one of the shorter WWDCs. It actually felt that they had taken that 5-minute section from WWDC 2024 where they introduced all those new Siri features and then took it and spread it out and milked it for an hour, basically redoing it. And for those not familiar, basically this year's WWDC was all about new Siri features, the big one being personal context. So you could ask Siri, I'll give you an example. Someone asked me for my calendar info for June and July.

Mm-hm.

Earlier today. So I said, send an email to so-and-so with my calendar availability for the next 2 months. And it was able to do that. Other ones could be like, take the note that I wrote about XYZ and text it over to that person, right? These are real-world workflow features that I've been using all day for the last week or so, which makes it, A, all the more ridiculous that Apple had to delay that stuff 2 years ago. That's insane. And it took 2 years to ship.

Yeah.

But the most insane part about it is that Apple's responses to these delays all downplayed the features. They said, "Oh, we spent 180 minutes talking about Apple Intelligence and only 5 out of the 180 minutes were delayed and not shipped." They basically positioned these as, "Oh, when it was a delay, it's not a big deal." Now that I'm using it, these are actually the only features that matter that they announced 2 years ago.

Yeah, they could have delayed Genmoji. They shouldn't have delayed look up your calendar. 'cause that's a functional use that people are gonna do.

Yes, and just to be clear, the new Siri is really good.

Yeah.

And 95% of the people, sorry to say this, are not going to need ChatGPT on their phone because they have Siri AI pre-installed.

Yeah.

The way I look at it is that ChatGPT does a bunch of amazing things that Siri AI can't do. But Siri AI also does a lot of amazing things that you'd go to for ChatGPT. So if you're 95% of the population using AI chatbots and you're using it for looking things up, it's basically the new age Google. It's going to be able to do that. It's going to be able to answer questions for you. It's going to be able to do edits for you. But there's like a ton of pro-level things that ChatGPT does that Siri AI can't do.

Yeah.

So I made a list the other day of things that ChatGPT can't do. Big-time research, big-time analysis of multiple different documents and PDFs and comparisons. People use it for it for tax preparation. People use it for in-depth health things. So there's a lot you're gonna wanna use it for. So I could see people having both Siri AI on the pre-installed and then you're gonna subscribe to a ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or what have you for some of that extra oomph on top of it. But Siri AI is gonna be useful for a lot of people. And you know, one easy way to say it— Yeah, we already— Oh, just hold on.

Sure.

Look at it as like iMovie and Final Cut.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, we debated this like, have you ever Googled anything? And I still Google things pretty regularly and then I go to LLMs for more pro stuff and then I go to Agentic AI for other things. And like, there's like using a right tool for the job that I think people are processing and absorbing. What do you think in hindsight actually delayed these features? Because it does feel like the technology she was there a year or two ago. Was it the negotiation, the deal with Google? Like, was this a technology problem or a business problem?

It was a mix of both. One was the underlying stack and the underlying foundation models that Apple had two years ago were not very good.

Sure, sure.

And so they needed to go back to the drawing board because they couldn't roll these features out only for them to fail, which is ironic given they rolled out the rest of the Apple intelligence and new Siri features that hardly worked well and were not impressive.

Yeah.

If you've used the new betas, you can tell what has happened here. The under-the-hood models are so much better. Based on what I have heard internally, Apple believes that they're basically 6 months behind OpenAI and ChatGPT in terms of the use cases that they have right now. So Siri works great, search works great. Image Playground, which is their image generation tool, the same underlying tech stack that powers Genmoji, it's like close to what you're getting from Gemini and close to what you're getting from ChatGPT.

Yeah.

So everything basically just works now. It's a great experience. I mean, the first beta is sloppy and it's buggy as you would expect, but they've taken something that was, was way less than mediocre. And they're giving people a baseline now that's actually functional. I would look at it as this way, when you take the iPhone out of the box, it has all these pre-installed apps. They're not great, but they work and you could, you know, use your phone based on what comes out of the box.

Yeah.

What Apple had with AI was not that.

Yeah.

The pre-installed stuff just didn't work. Yeah. But then you can go to the App Store and you can get a much better messaging app and much better browser, email app, 10 times better versions of all the pre-installed apps. That's the case with AI, whereas now the pre-installed stuff is baseline and it works great, but you can go out and get even better stuff if you want.

Yeah. How high is, how high are the walls of the walled garden? Like you gave that example of look up your calendar. I use Google Calendar. Send an email, I use Gmail. I'm not in the, even though I'm like iPhone, Mac user, I'm not fully in the Apple ecosystem. Is this going to work for me? Or am I going to bump up against different walled gardens as I try and go around?

Yeah, another example is like, I don't use Apple Music, I use Spotify. Can I tell—

And the shortcut paths.

Will I be able to tell Siri, like, make me a playlist with these 3 artists and make a Spotify playlist? I'm guessing no, but—

Well, it is too early to tell. It really is going to depend on how broad Apple's developer tools for the new Siri are going to become over time. The first set of tools are there. They're a bit limited. It depends on how, how closely Spotify and Google and all those other companies are going to want to work with Apple.

Mm-hmm.

I would say it's going to be a slow burn. I would say that, you know, if it was Google, I would want my applications to work better with Android and Google Pixel so I can get these cool AI features and bring people more into my ecosystem.

Mm-hmm.

So I would say even if they opened up the tools to the degree that you guys are explaining those scenarios for, I would say it's not gonna work as well as it would if you're tapped into the Apple Mail ecosystem and the other Apple services, which is a shame, but I think over time Apple will get there. And let's not forget, Google is doing very similar stuff right now with Android 17.

Mm-hmm.

And a lot of these scenarios I've explained on the iOS side of things, are completely available to what you're seeing on the Android side of the world as well with this new Android Hub. So if you're deep in the Google ecosystem with Gmail and Chrome, you know, you get a good experience on iOS, but my Pixel friends, they get a great experience, especially with, you know, the new Android stuff rolling out.

How are you thinking— oh wait, first off, were there any surprises? Did anything surprise you?

Nothing surprised us.

Did anything surprise me? Were there any surprises around the BBC? I think I was a little surprised that there wasn't a little bit more. It seemed like, you know, well, that's it. Like I knew, you know, everything that was coming in the keynote and, you know, beyond. I actually just put a story out about how there's a new iPhone Air coming out in spring just a few minutes ago. So happy to talk about that.

Yeah.

But next spring. You know, I would've, Spring '27.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I would've expected more out of this, out of this dev conference.

Okay, yeah, let's switch gears to iPhone Air. Seemed like there were some good reviews. I've seen a couple people carry them, but it felt like it wasn't selling as well as people expected. And so it might just have been a one-off, but there is another one coming. Like what is the correct story or framing around the iPhone Air?

So Apple's engineering data, and this shouldn't come as a shock to anyone, The two biggest complaints for the first generation phone are the battery life and the camera. And Apple knows this because they came out with that battery attachment on the back.

Sure.

Which is crazy. And then they tried to market the single camera on the back of the iPhone Air as being four lenses, whatever that means.

Sure.

So for this second version, they're upping the battery life.

Okay.

And I don't necessarily think that's because of a bigger battery pack. But I think it's the efficiency gains you're going to get from 2-nanometer in this new A20 Pro chip. And then the other big addition will be a second rear camera for ultra-wide angle photography, which a lot of people really like on the iPhone 17 and the iPhone, you know, 17 Pro and Pro Max models. Mm-hmm. And so it's going to be a really nice upgrade. And I think at $999, a little bit less expensive than the iPhone Pros, having a little bit better battery life, with having that second camera, that's going to be a really compelling offering. Mm-hmm. And so I would say, you know, 30,000-foot view, what they're doing to the iPhone over the last year past, in the next few years, what they've got, like this 3 to 4 year period of the iPhone, incredibly impressive. They're knocking it out of the park. I mean, the iPhone last year, that launch, the 17 Pro and Pro Max, extremely strong and the next few years are remarkable as well. This fall, the 18 Pro and Pro Max, the first foldable phone, which I'm calling the iPhone Ultra. I believe that will be the name, but let's see, you know, still a little early.

Mm-hmm.

And then next spring you'll have the regular iPhone 18 and the iPhone Air 2. 2. We'll see if they call it the 18 Air or the Air 2. And then next fall, you'll have the iPhone 20 and iPhone 20 Pro Max. Those being the 20th anniversary models, complete redesign, curved glass, slimmer bezels, smaller Dynamic Island, and all that.

Lighter, faster.

You'll have cleaner, yeah. It's gonna be nice.

Like day-by-day leaks of like exactly what happens. I was gonna do that.

It's funny.

It's incredible.

And then the second foldable phone. So it's a jam-packed 2027. 2027 is going to be Apple's biggest product year in its history.

That's great.

I'm pumped as a consumer.

Will they, do you think, do you think they will ever try to create the conditions to get somebody to own a everyday consumer, consumer to try to have multiple phones? IPhones? Like, will they create a product, like, set of features that's like a digital twin where you have like your iPhone Ultra and your iPhone Air? Run two phones. And you just—

I'm, yeah. As someone who lives and breathes—

Yeah.

I don't know what I'm gonna do. As someone who lives and breathes this stuff, I don't know what I'm gonna do because I can already tell you right now, I want the new iPhone Air.

Yeah.

I want the iPhone foldable.

Yeah.

And I want the iPhone 20. So it's like, I don't know what I'm gonna do. What a first world problem to have. We're talking about not even 2 phones, but now I want 3 phones. Yeah. So you can't complain.

No, but it feels like for them, it feels like for them, I don't think you're gonna be the only one. And it's always been interesting to me, you know, people complain about iPhone pricing, but there are not that many products in the world that are as like, that have as much utility as an iPhone, that you use as much as the iPhone. Like, if the iPhone was $10,000, there'd be a big market for them, right? And so I feel like Apple over time—

Don't give them any ideas.

Well, yeah, but I just feel like over time it's like, how do we make more money? It's like, well, you make a feature so that you have like, you can have like, yeah, this is the iPhone I use on the weekend, this is the iPhone that I use during the work week, or whatever.

They should do that. They'll probably get a lot of, uh, They'll probably get a lot of heat for that depending on how they articulate it. Hopefully they don't hire you as the marketing person for that. 'Cause you're just gonna come across very aggressive.

Well, I'm just giving them business ideas. Like I think like I'm giving them whatever it is, $1,500 a year for iPhones. I don't even know the pricing, but they could probably get, they could probably get more.

They will. I mean, I would expect the prices to go up on all of these things. The foldable phone obviously is gonna be 2 grand. 9 Plus. The other thing to note is in iOS 27, they actually have a feature where you can—

They think they can price the Ultra higher than specs? They're out of their mind.

I think they'll be, I think they'll be higher than specs, but they added a new feature. Who, Snap?

No, I'm kidding.

No, he's joking.

Oh, we can get to that.

Specs are very highly priced, yeah.

But iPhone or iOS 27 has a feature where you can synchronize a single phone number and carrier account between two iPhones. So it does have that on the phone number side of things, but you're not going to be able to, you know, pick up a, make a feature to have the weekend stuff and during the week stuff and the night stuff. That'd be cool though. I don't know. Screw it. Maybe I'll get the Foldable 2 and the 20 at the same time in a year from now. So we'll see. You're welcome, Apple.

Does the Foldable eat into iPad or is it purely additive?

I think it's purely additive. I think that Apple has positioned the iPad itself at this point as a companion device to the iPhone and the Mac. I think they've done a great job at that. So I don't think the foldable is gonna take away iPad sales, particularly because of the price delta is so high. There will be a new OLED iPad mini coming out soon, which I think a lot of the iPad mini fanboys are gonna be pretty pumped about.

That's great. What about, what you got for the Apple Vision Pro? Pro fanboys like myself, uh, what are we doing in AR/VR glasses? We just talked to, uh, the founder of Raven Renaissance. He's making augmented reality glasses. Obviously, specs launched as well. Is there any movement there or anything from WWDC on the software side that might actually hint at or translate into, uh, wearables?

Uh, the Vision Pro added this new feature where it uses the external cameras to give you a sense of your external environment and objects object identification.

Mm-hmm.

That's going to be a feature at the heart of new AirPods coming out at the end of next year. It's a project called B798 where they have cameras on the AirPods that can help you with navigation and seeing the world around you. Cloud processing, feeding that data into Siri AI. Same functionality will come to the smart glasses from Apple. Non-AR, right? No displays.

Mm-hmm.

Those will be rolled out at the very end of 2027, hopefully in time for the holiday season. But they're a little behind on those. Augmented reality glasses from Apple, I would expect much later in the decade.

Mm-hmm.

New Vision Pro. So the Vision Pro is on ice. You're not going to see another new Vision Pro redesign, but what you are going to see is a completely rethought, revamped, from ground up mixed reality headset from Apple.

Woo!

Okay, I'm listening.

Okay, I'm thinking 2029, maybe end 2028, but it's gonna be a long time.

Where's the Vision Air? We got the Vision Pro. They killed it. Just make it lighter.

They killed it. Well, this is gonna be a lighter, this is gonna be a much lighter end-to-end retooling, revamping of the headset. It's not a Vision Pro 2. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a start-from-scratch type of product.

Give me the Vision Ultra.

That's why it takes so long.

Make it 25 pounds on my face.

Yeah, it's gonna be, you know, it's interesting. When the Vision Pro launched and they were looking for different ways to take this product and, you know, give it a market, this is gonna sound surprising to you, but obviously on one hand they were looking at how do we make this thing cheaper and lighter?

Yeah.

One of the directions they were actually also looking at, how do you make this thing even higher end? How do you make this thing even more expensive? How do you make this thing even better from a technical chop standpoint? How do you reduce the latency? Should we do a model that's specific for medical grade, for enterprise, for these high-value targets that maybe would be willing to pay $5,000 for this machine?

Yeah.

A business-class version of the Vision Pro. Ultimately, they're not moving in this direction right now. It's all about that end-to-end retool.

Where does Apple sit on enterprise versions of their products? Like the Mac Pro, is that the last time they had something dedicated? Like Mac Studio, do they think of that as like an enterprise-grade product?

The MacBook Pro is an enterprise product.

I feel like MacBook Pro is extremely consumer, but I don't know. Like how did they think about like actually, you know, segmenting been segmenting out that market?

It's been a while. They had the Xserve servers 15 years ago. You can make the argument like the Mac Pro, Mac Studio, what have you. But the thinking in Apple is make these baseline products for consumers that consumers love and make them so enjoyable that you're gonna want to use them at work too. And then provide the software tools that allow you to do that. And if you remember, 2008, the iPhone renaissance starting then, a lot of credit goes to the price, cutting the price down to $199. A lot of credit goes to the App Store. Some of the credit goes to 3G. Some of the credit goes to geographic distribution. But the one thing that people leave off when they talk about how did the iPhone go from here to here is 2008 is when Apple added enterprise support for the iPhone. Yeah. Phone. And so getting these things in businesses is really, really important. For the Vision Pro, just like HoloLens, Magic Leap, and other AR/VR companies before them, they had no choice but to go all in on the enterprise, or not go all in, go a little bit deeper into the enterprise than they normally would like with their products, because that was their biggest market.

Yeah.

Today, all of Apple's other products, watches, phones, iPads, Macs, they have really big, you know, footprints in the enterprise. But the enterprise is still only a sliver of the overall market. You know, 90% of their sales are consumer.

Yep.

Vision Pro, you know, the split is a lot bigger in favor of enterprise.

Any update on the lamp?

The lamp? Oh, the tabletop robot.

Yeah.

I still expect that to come 2028.

Ooh.

We're going to see the smart home display. I know, I know, I know. Smart home display, probably at the, as early as the end of this year.

Okay.

That's gonna be an amazing product.

Yeah.

And I think it's going to be a blockbuster. And I think it's gonna be a gigantic seller. Just imagine having this thing on your desk, your wall, your counter, you can walk up to it, it could recognize you, it could pull up the stuff for, you know, you and—

Content.

Let's pretend Jordi and John live together. Jordi walks up to it, all of Jordi's stuff comes up. John walks up to it, all of John's stuff comes up. It has this personalized Siri and can grab all that stuff from the device. It has FaceTime, it has intercom, it has smart home control, control your music. You can watch video on it. I think it's gonna be really, really great holiday gift when this thing finally comes out.

How will it control the music? Like, are they gonna finally make a run of matching Sonos, which is in a very, very tough spot as a $1.7 billion company? Are they going to try and make a run?

Is that it? $1.7 billion?

$1.7 billion down.

What's Peloton?

Peloton, let's see. Peloton market cap, $2.4 billion. So bigger.

It's crazy because like Oura, it's like a $10 billion valuation, right? I mean, it's amazing.

Yeah, but I mean, Sonos has frustrated a lot of people with the software. They rolled a bunch of stuff back, but in terms of actually all offering a consumer, prosumer level experience with Wi-Fi connected speakers that are available in more than just one SKU or two SKUs. Yes, you can go all in on the Apple speakers, but then you just have a ton of really small speakers around.

Yeah, I found out I have speakers built inside of my walls, and it gave me insane, they're not Sonos, thankfully, but I was like, it gave me insane I'm having Sonos PTSD 'cause I'm like, imagine you have an issue with—

Well, you take the aux from that and you plug that into whatever you want, some sort of receiver, but Apple doesn't make that receiver right now.

Like, you know, Apple had such an opportunity with the HomePod in speakers and they completely blew it because of AI, because they didn't create an app ecosystem around it, because they made it exclusive to their, you know, customer base, no Android support. The list goes on. Pretty disappointing. They haven't given the HomePod a meaningful update in 6 years since the HomePod mini launched. They did a little minor refresh to the HomePod in '23. But I thought when the first HomePod launched in 2018, that they were going to be able to really go all in on speakers, different form factors, different versions. When this, this, but smart home is one of 2 pillars for Apple right now. AI wearables and then AI smart home devices. And so you'll see the smart home hub You'll see one other thing in home security. You'll see that lamp, as you call it. You'll see a refresh of the home. Table lamp, bro.

What if the lamp and the home security combine and you have killer lamps?

Sounds like a nightmare.

You can release—

And you combine it with AI.

Are there, wait, are there any Apple products with motors in them that I'm not thinking of?

No, this will be the first one. With an artificial arm.

Yeah.

And it's a motorized Apple product that can move around in space. And so if you think about it, this is a piece of the legacy of the Apple Car because this project was part of the Apple Car AI and mechanics and part of that division. And it was one of the things that got left over. In fact, the person who ran the entire Apple Car project when it shut down, Kevin Lynch, this was the guy who ran software for the Apple Watch for a very long time and helped build that product from the ground up. His project now is the lamp.

The lamp.

Lamp man. It's not quite a lamp.

It's a big deal going from running the Apple Watch to the Apple Car to the Apple Lamp.

Do you believe the conspiracy theories that suggest that the Ferrari Luce is just a rebadged Apple car?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. The Apple car looks like a new age VW bus.

Oh.

You know, I think the Luce would have been successful as $150,000 Apple car, but as a $700,000 Ferrari, I think they missed the mark.

Well, who knows? You might need to buy one to get access to other cars. Like Ferrari is a very exclusive brand. It's a very complicated business model. You never know how it'll—

Yeah, no, it's funny. I saw people go like on ChatGPT after the Lucid was announced, they typed in make me an electric Ferrari and they're like, I made a better design in 15 seconds.

Not hard to do. Any predictions for specs? It feels like at a normal company would launch this product and then probably shutter the program. I expect, I wouldn't be surprised if Spiegel triples down, but it just feels like I cannot see the market for a $2,000, you know, pair of smart glasses that still feel like they're not going to add a tremendous amount of value to my daily life.

I like Evan Spiegel. I like some of the stuff Snap is doing. I think the design of the glasses actually looks pretty cool. I haven't tried the latest prototype yet, but I think they're well-designed and a nice product. The question is if there's going to be a killer app for it, and right now it doesn't seem to be the case. I think the price actually isn't terrible. You know, the vision when we started talking about these things half a decade ago was they need to get to smartphone prices. Smartphone prices are now $2,000. But if you can get this thing down to a grand, which I don't know how that's ever gonna happen, you're talking about something fairly compelling.

Yeah. Meta Ray-Ban displays are at $800. Do you think they're losing a bunch of money on that?

I think they're losing money on them. I don't think people are buying them. Basically Meta, what they've done is they've created a 3-tier system.

Mm-hmm.

Tier A is the non-display glasses that look exactly like normal glasses and don't have a display. And those have been extraordinarily popular because of the Luxottica brands pushing those. Tier B has been the Meta Display, which is this little HUD, a little heads-up display you have in there, and you use the wristband controller. The third tier is the true AR glasses. I don't think that mid-tier with the HUD is gonna last. The price is, you know, relatively solid, but I just don't see that as something people are gonna be compelled by. You want dual display, you want binocular displays, you want immersiveness. Then on the other hand, if you tried the Vision Pro, you're spoiled. And so it's like, really, do you want to use any of these things? 'Cause did I see a photo of you on a plane wearing a Vision Pro the other day?

Oh yeah. Yeah. I watch whole movies.

Which one of it? It was one of you two.

Yeah, it was me.

It was you.

John.

Okay. John.

I'll watch the entire Lawrence of Arabia from start to finish in a Vision Pro.

Your hair is so similar, I can't tell who's who anymore, but that's me on a plane.

Yeah.

Like, I love that thing for movie watching.

It's amazing.

If you've installed Vision OS 27, have you installed it yet?

No.

Better?

The new Siri is pretty good on there. And then they have this new environment. I don't remember which, where it is in the world. Might be Iceland. It's really remarkable. And then you can set any of your panoramas now, the good ones at least, as your environment. So a few little bells and whistles tweaks in Vision OS 27. I don't think it's the— yeah, it's not the software.

I'll be in Austin, right, on Sunday. I'll take a panorama of the UltraDome. And then when I'm on that plane, I'll be able to sit here rewatch our interview on that screen there.

That's funny.

In full immersion.

Midjourney hardware release. Any predictions? Have you followed it at all?

Yeah, I've been looking at this closely. We're going to be covering it tonight. I believe the launch is 6:00 PM.

Yeah.

The head of hardware engineering is someone who came from the Vision Pro team. He was a manager on the Vision Pro hardware team. It seems like they've been working on this for a couple years. I would file this immediately in the category of products that may never launch or may never be bought by anyone. I wonder what will sell more.

Experimental.

Yeah, experimental. The specs for this product, probably the specs, to be quite honest with you. I think the last thing someone sent me before I came on with you guys was that the product is gonna be large in size. So I don't know what that necessarily means. And I guess that would rule out a headset of some sort.

Smart keg.

Integrator, who knows. Yeah, I just thought like some, my head went to like local compute, something that— Sure, tiny box or something. Something for like prosumer creators type of thing.

Eh, I don't think that's interesting. I think you need something image-based, something visual, not another Mac Studio.

Yeah, last question about WWDC. The parental controls, the focus on, it feels like Apple's solving some of the like societal anxiety around like, are phones bad for kids?

Are phones bad for people?

Housing anxiety. All this, yeah, is it existential? Like what do you think they were driving there? Was that message received? Because obviously AI is everything everyone talks about, but how important are those features What were your takeaways from how, like why they chose to focus on that so much? How important are those features? And then will that actually move the needle on like young device adoption?

Couple of things. Regulators around the world are going absolutely nuts about this stuff. Smartphone addiction, social media, et cetera.

Yeah.

And Apple needs to address all this stuff before it becomes their next EU-related problem. Problem or EU-like problem.

Sure.

The other thing is AI, and not that Apple has had great AI on the phone, but obviously the fears of AI taking over things.

Yeah.

And then the other thing I would say is they launched Screen Time, I believe in 2018, which is their parental control, the name of their parental control system. It's just been an unmitigated disaster that hasn't worked properly for like 5 or 6 years. That's true. And so they really needed to revamp it.

But it was bug-driven? Yeah, bug-driven. Because I've noticed sometimes I'll go into Screen Time and it'll be like the washingtonpost.com is 23 hours and 59 minutes. And I'm like, I had one tab open and it was just like churning and sending something.

Super buggy.

Yeah.

Kids being able to just do whatever the hell they want on their phones, even if they're not supposed to, just a bunch of issues. And so they needed to do an end-to-end revamp. And it's smart timing given they've really, they've finally got the AI in place. And then you've got a lot of people who are like, "I don't want digital devices anymore. I want an MP3 player. Bring the iPod back." Right? Get this screen—

Palmer Luckey is out there, banging the gong about retro futuristic devices, the Game Boy.

It's a real thing. It's a real thing.

Would Apple ever do a re-release of the, like an iPod?

I don't think so.

No, that's not their style. That's Palmer Luckey's domain.

Well, you guys know how this feature works, right? Like you turn it on and then over time, you can expand the feature set, who people can contact, applications you have. So you can really, you know, turn the iPhone into a dumb phone now and then let it get smart over time. It's actually a remarkable concept. And I think if executed well, it's pretty compelling and all the other phone makers are gonna copy it.

Interesting. Happy birthday, son. You're 17, you get to unlock the calculator app now.

Exactly.

Enjoy it. Don't go too crazy with those numbers. Who knows? Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat.

Great to see you.

Always great.

Thank you guys. See you next time. Appreciate it.

Bye, have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it, folks. Stop making sense.

Just go do it. Every founder that we talked to that raises capital at NYSE loves it. They love it. They say it's incredible. Yeah, NPS is through the roof. Just go do it.

NPS is legitimately through the roof.

When you're raising that Series D or F, why not just head over to the New York Stock Exchange?

We got Ryan Daniels from Crosby, the co-founder and CEO, in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVPN Ultradome.

Ryan, how you doing?

How you doing? Good to see you again. What's the latest?

Good to see you guys.

Welcome back. You're benchmarking. You're benchmarking.

Benchmarks.

Always got to benchmark.

Tell us about benchmarks. What are you launching? Why is it important? Break it down for us.

So today we published a benchmark. It's the first benchmark that we know of that just looks at, it's simple in theory, but a negotiation between two lawyers, as far as we can get to completion.

Yeah.

And I think the main takeaway is there's a lot of art to negotiating, and the way that lawyers negotiate contracts is really complex because there's so many moving variables.

Mm-hmm.

And this is what we do at Crosby. We try to get deals closed faster. And so for the first time, we can actually measure, you know, how do agents do on the first redline? That's fine. We kind of know that already. But how do they go over and over through the process where the judgment of a lawyer really takes hold and they just try to figure out who is their counterparty and how can they get them to yes?

Next step, you got to train a voice model to be able to yell on the phone at the other client at the counterparty, let them know that you're not doing another turn of the forms. The battle of the forms is over. No, obviously there's a lot that goes into this. Talk about the data. Are you getting good redline data, ground truth data from firms? Are they happy to partner with you on this? Like, what is the value prop to actually get to get the correct data? Are you doing it yourself through a data firm? Like, what's the strategy to get the ground truth here? Because it is, it's not the same as like a math problem that you can just verify with lean.

Yeah, that's the key point of it. And like, you're totally right. Like, so we worked with MicroOne really closely on this with Ali and his team. They've been amazing. They have like a really great legal focus that they're building out. You know, we have our own captive law firm here. That's been our kind of shtick from the beginning was in order to get the full benefits of what agents can do in law, start your own law firm, sell end-to-end legal work. And as agents get better, our margins get better. And we worked with Ali, and the hard thing is like there is no right answer. And we basically had large groups of real lawyers negotiating all with the same positions for the same parties and seeing like how much did those lawyers agree with one another on the right way to respond to those other lawyers. And so we could just see the overlap. And as the negotiation went longer and longer, we saw a ton of deviation between those lawyers, which is fascinating.

Mm-hmm.

Like, they're all very senior. They're all very experienced. This is a real negotiation. But at the beginning, the lawyers kind of more or less did the same thing. And we just saw the way the agents— we then built a rubric based on how those lawyers actually worked and tried to create some sort of, like, ground truth for the best way to negotiate. But, like, to your point, like, I don't know, maybe if we just did everything in all caps the kind of party where you just accept it and you could yell through the margin. So, yet to try it.

That's where you gotta pay the big bucks if you got big lungs and can scream. What, like, it seems like all the models did very similarly. 50%, 50.5 for GPT-5.5, weird numerology there. 5.5 gets a 50.5. Gemini 3.5 Flash got a 45.1. Opus 4.8 got 40. 44.4 and Fable 5 got 47.3. That seems surprising. I mean, it seems like the window for testing was low or is that something like Fable is more tuned to cybersecurity, bio, those sort of reinforced learnings, those feedback loops and maybe it hasn't been applied to legal yet. But what was your interpretation?

We put a big asterisk on Fable because we got one testing through and then we lost access.

Wow.

So we still would want to do a few more. Sure. If and when we get access back. I think it's not surprising. I think what was most interesting to us were a few things. One, in the first redline, like the first read of a document thing, and agents really did poorly. They scored poorly there because they couldn't surface those first issues. As the negotiation went on, we knew the issues. Models did quite a bit better. But the biggest thing was models are really likely to just say yes and accept some term because you want to keep the deal going. And that was part of the instruction. And that's just not good lawyering, right? Like, a great lawyer knows how to kind of make you feel like you're getting your side, but still push the deal forward and protect the client. And that's where the real judgment came in. And so, you know, in our mind, we have a lot of work to do because we want our agents to be able to take the work off our lawyers' hands. Mm-hmm. To be able to think through something and say, hey, like we push back on this for this reason and really get the counterparty there. So, you know, I think the models did better than we thought they would, but there's a lot of work to do.

We're having a little bit of interference. I have one more question. Go for it. Jordi, if you have anything you need to get in. I just want to know about the value of the harness because it seems like all of these models are sort of neck and neck, you know, within a few percentage. What happens if you wrap them wrap them in a very bespoke harness that your team builds, can you get to 70%, 90%? Like where do you think the upper bound is on this benchmark?

Yeah, that's a great question. And like every, you know, everything's published, it's all open source. So like the harness that we use, everything can all be replicated.

Yeah.

There's a lot of ways to push. I think, you know, we've invested a lot in the harness that we wrote specifically that's really good at editing Word documents. That turned out to be a really hard thing. And so there's ways to push there. I think ultimately more and more bespoke models that are really post-trained on just making judgment calls, stating their reasoning will be an area. So both of those things help. But at the end of the day, there's a ton of intelligence in just the closed models. And I think it's not being fully exploited. So yeah, all areas to explore. That's the right questions.

How has your team experimented with— with token maxing? Like, I met— you guys are heavily funded. You're building an AI law firm. Yeah. I imagine you're not telling the team, like, you know, be conservative with tokens, especially 'cause you can just, like, learn faster, and it's kind of the whole point of the business. But where does token maxing make sense with legal? Have you already found an equilibrium? What is your overall kind of like ethos around it?

I feel like as a company, we're not successful enough to be like worried about token costs yet. We're still in a place where we can just be like putting as much money. And I think more and more law firms, like Kirkland just allocated half a billion dollars to building their own AI stuff, are just trying to figure out, you know, they're charging, they're charging huge amounts of money for the labor spend of legal. So they have a lot of room to throw money at tokens. And so long as you're like basically spending less than the equivalent of $1,000 an hour, on tokens, which is even for this still hard to do, you're still coming out with a good margin. So we're spending a ton. We did a lot of work with Fable. We got early access to it, and we spent a lot of money with it. And so I think there's still room to go because ultimately, it's either the model or the human, and the models are still cheaper than hiring expensive lawyers for some of the tasks that we don't think we need lawyers for.

Yeah, that makes sense. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come to the show.

Yeah, sorry for the technical difficulties, but yeah, great to get the update.

And we will talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Thanks, gentlemen. Goodbye.

See you, Ryan.

Let me tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Our next guest, Isaiah from Bland, is the co-founder and CEO. He's in the waiting room. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? How you doing?

What's up, dude?

I'm doing good. This is like the coolest thing I get to do for this fundraiser announcement. Fantastic.

Well, kick it off.

I know, I know. It's way too— Tell us about the fundraiser.

How much did you raise?

This is way overdue.

How much did you raise?

We raised $50 million.

Hit it again, hit it again, 'cause it should have happened a long time ago.

There we go. Congratulations.

Bye.

Now tell us, what do you do?

Long overdue.

Yeah, so you guys know when you call basically any big company in the US and you have to deal with one of those really annoying bots, we replace that with AI. But our specialty, we like to say, is like we want to do the calls where if something goes wrong, someone sues or dies. So we do the really complex, hard-to-handle calls, and then we do that without OpenAI. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that on here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And Drop or anyone else. So—

So you're training your own models.

Yeah, correct.

Uh, and, uh, okay, so, so more specifically, like, are you working, like, uh, not like 911 calls? Is that— is that— I imagine that's not your focus, right? Because it— or maybe it is, but I know there's some companies that, that just focus on that. Are you thinking like hospitals? Like, what, what, what kind of— give us some more maybe concrete examples.

Hospitals airlines, and yes, 911 calls eventually. So we're actually working on a product offering for that right now. I can't say too much about that, but I do have this weird feeling that like poetically I'm gonna die by a botched AI 911 call one day. And that's kind of my mission.

Don't man it, don't man it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're a time traveler going back in time.

I gotta warm myself.

Yeah, you gotta save yourself. What, how, describe this market, like describe voice, describe the voice AI market, right? Like you guys have some competition from the Frontier Labs, but it seems like less competition than maybe one would think, or maybe it's like, almost certainly has to be less competitive than coding agencies, agents, right, where you have, you know, thousands of companies and the labs and the hyperscalers all competing.

Yeah, yeah, and you'd be surprised. So like 2 years ago, we were one of the first companies to do this. This was like well before the labs. And I have a little binder of screenshots of different VCs that I'm sure talk about their voice AI thesis today who said, "No one will be talking to AI 2 years from today." And by the way, very unpopular if you go into a fundraise reminding them that they said that. They don't like that.

Yeah.

So I don't recommend that. It seems wise.

Gloves for sure. On that point of like, no one will be talking to AI, it seems like, are you actually increasing the length of phone calls? Like I'm seeing like the typical call lasts 30 to 45 minutes. That feels like too long, honestly. That feels like a long time. Are people asking your models to write Python for them or something and they're transcribing that?— one character at a time? Like, what's going on?

It'd be a little roundabout, but yeah, we do calls with like 90-year-old patients doing 45-minute-long remote patient monitoring calls.

Okay.

And so, if you want them to put on the blood pressure device, right, and you wanna figure out if they're having a heart attack, you have to hear about their grandchild first. That is an immovable object you have to get through.

Sure, okay.

These are lonely, lonely people.

Oh, that's interesting. —somewhat like put guardrails on, obviously, but the guardrails can't be too narrow to the point where you're a phone tree, because you actually do have to open up the customer, open up the user on the other end of the line, and start actually having a conversation before you can do a more complex interaction.

Oh, yeah.

Do companies have specific ideas about that, preconceived notions, whether they should or shouldn't whether that's table stakes, like what does that look like?

So we work with a couple of like really big banks. Yeah. And one of them had a minute and a half long disclosure we had to read at the start of every call.

Okay.

I know, thank you. Nice.

I worked that in there. So if you're a big bank watching this, please disregard everything else I've said and just reach out.

Okay.

But we had to have a minute and a half long disclosure. So if you wanted to have a human being talk to our AI, you had to sit through a minute and a half of straight reading out different things to them. And then they would get on, you know, we'd get on calls with them and they'd say like, it's varying, right? Like not every bank's like this. We've worked with some really big ones that are less painful, but they were like, yeah, how do we know the AI's not gonna say something racist?

Sure, sure.

Well, we're pretty sure that it won't. And you have to go through this really intensive testing process. And so what a lot of people don't realize is that these call centers and these really big ones that we're dealing with, every business has tried to get rid of them every possible way that they can.

Mm-hmm.

They only exist because there's a gap between what the business wants to offer and what it can offer. And so when you hear about like AI receptionists or you hear about e-commerce, where's my order calls, that's not what we're doing. We're doing the hard part of the $250 billion a year spend in the US, and that is really, is really early. That is like astoundingly early. I don't think people realize how early it is.

Makes sense. What is, I mean, you're talking to big banks, like what is the actual go-to-market motion funnel? Is it all sales-driven or are there inbound? Do you have an inbound team or is there any like sort of like self-serve option at this point?

We have 350,000 self-serve users, but most of it is actually inbound leads. So we do viral marketing every once in a while. You guys might have seen this, but we had a billboard. This was back before it was like cool to do billboards.

Okay.

That said, "Still hiring humans?" question mark, and it had a phone number on it.

Okay.

Not "Stop hiring humans." That is a different company that ripped that billboard off.

Yeah, oh, okay.

We're not happy with that.

Oh, you guys were the first.

We were the first, and I actually got a chance while the founder of that other company was getting a haircut to go up to him and tell him what I thought.

'Cause I found out we were the same. Oh, haircut's crazy. He's locked in.

Wow.

Captive audience.

Oh, it's sort of a captive audience, right? The poor people did not know what was going on and why we were so upset at each other.

Yeah, 'cause you invented billboards. So for him to come in and not only run a billboard, but to use similar language, it's just, you know.

Same graphics, same everything. I was like, he's like, "Oh, I'm a big fan of your billboards." I'm like, "Yeah, I know." Ted Turner. But yeah, so we bought the rights to Soulja Boy's voice, for example. You all know Soulja Boy, like Crank That, right? Kiss Me Through the Phone. So we've done a lot of viral marketing and we've managed to get CIOs, great people to come in and actually come to us. We do a lot of outbound too, but primarily CIOs, famous musicians.

Wait, so does Soulja Boy help you win in the enterprise?

Like you would not believe because he was, He was really popular around the time that most of the CIOs were like teenagers.

College. High school, yeah.

Or, you know, young adults.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He probably crushes it like AWS re:Invent in Vegas.

Are there any of your customers actively using Soulja Boy's voice for their customer service, or is that just like kind of a—

I'm gonna need to read a disclosure to you for a minute and a half. But I'm bringing in Soulja Boy to do it.

I think that's a winning formula. That would be the retention there would probably be really quite good.

Yeah, why not? Yes, actually, there's a lot of, mostly there's a lot of restaurants because apparently people really love it. But we have his name published under a different name on the platform. So we have Soulja Boy's official voice and then we have a name that's hidden for the other one. The other voice is very popular. So there are a few enterprises that if you stumble upon it and you call, you might not realize it, but you're actually talking to Soldier Boy.

The one and only.

Wow.

Talk about working with Paul Lieberstein.

Yeah, I never get to meet—

The actor behind Toby on The Office.

Oh yeah. I never get to meet the celebrities. It's always the marketing team. He was incredibly nice to work with, very pleasant. Ramp had Kevin or Brian, And I have to be very careful about the names and not mixing them up. But we were like, who's the most boring person that we could possibly think of? Because the company's name is Bland, so it kind of comes with the territory.

That's fair.

And everyone was like, well, Toby from The Office. Paul, I think, was humored by that.

Sure.

Took it very graciously. And we ended up having a lot of really great interaction with that and sort of goes along with our our marketing, which is fun and engaging, but not maybe disruptive to the brand where you're like, these guys, I wouldn't trust them to handle my 911 calls.

Sure, sure, sure, yeah.

Imagine calling 911 and Soulja Boy picks up.

Soulja Boy.

That would be worrisome. I gotta say.

Oh well.

But good lead gen.

Yeah, well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Congrats. Who did the round?

So it was our insiders plus Dell and HubSpot. So we actually went very corporate on this round and we were excited to have them. Awesome.

Yeah, so you guys will be hearing more from us on some new models and stuff.

Fantastic.

Amazing. Great to finally meet you.

And thank you.

And yeah, congrats on all the progress.

Thank you for having me.

We'll talk to you soon.

Cheers.

Have a good one. In market news, more Fed officials have signaled penciled a rate increase as the next move. The central bank held interest rates steady as Kevin Warsh's first meeting as chairman, but 9 of 19 Federal Reserve officials penciled in at least one rate increase by year's end, up from none in March. And so, the market is selling off, down about 1% today based on that.

Good job.

There's also a G7 meeting that's happening between AI leaders. Donald Trump was seated next to Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis from Google's DeepMind at a summit in France on Wednesday discussing AI export controls and all things AI. The AI leaders are huddling at lunch with the G7 in France. And I'm sure there'll be more things to come out of that. There's still more back and forth on export controls. Fable 5 is embargoed in some way, and they're working through that. There's been a little bit more reporting, but not much major movement there. And then also, US has held off on blacklisting China's Deepseek, more than 100 firms, and more than 100 firms that are deemed security risks. That was part of the Fable 5 rollout, was that there was a South Korean telecom company, according to the reporting, that had access to to one of the most advanced models from Anthropic. And that firm, that Chinese, that South Korean telecom company had potentially ties to China in some way. And so the US government was skeptical of that South Korean telecom company. And so there was a debate over that and whether or not that crossed a bright line. And so from the Washington Post, Anthropic later disclosed that the list had ballooned. The list of companies that would be getting the most advanced models had ballooned and roughly 50 additional entities had already received access. Senior officials began to consider using export controls to claw back the technology after the company did not identify new recipients for days. When Anthropic finally turned over names, the administration discovered that one recipient was a South Korean telecommunications company company the administration suspected, alleged, of having ties to China, officials said. And so that is the key of the dustup there, but we'll be continuing to follow that.

In other news, much more tragically, many of you will have seen this by now, but Joshua Baier, who is the CEO and founder of Capital Factory, was in a—

Plane crash.

Plane crash.

In Laredo.

I guess early, early this morning coming back from Mexico to Austin, I unfortunately never got to meet Joshua, but only heard tremendous things about him, and he really was an important figure in the Austin startup community, so sending our prayers to Joshua's family and friends, and yeah, really, really tragic. [SPEAKING SPANISH] Yeah. Rest in peace.

Well, we should close on a positive note in some way. There's a whole discussion over SpaceX potentially using the high share price, the incredible valuation to acquire more companies, create a roll-up. There's a piece in the Financial Times we can run through another day, but Bill Ackman shares a Hall of Fame opening sentence. One of the things that makes SpaceX so valuable "Is how valuable it is." A tautological value argument. Of course, what he's actually getting at is that while the stock price is, is so high, that serves as a currency for acquisition. And when you're a public company, you can acquire companies very easily with your public stock. And so there's a very interesting window. Ben Thompson wrote about it on the back of the cursor. Acquisition closing or being announced that the option has been exercised. But it is a very interesting debate. We touched on it a little bit yesterday. Is there gonna be an acquisition spree? Will there be a roll-up? Will SpaceX buy Neo Cloud assets, energy assets, chip assets? Like, TerraFab has been talking. What's involved in that? I mean, they're trading at, what, 10 times Intel at this point or something? I don't know. What is it? Intel market cap. But there's so much that they could do. They, it's not 10 times Intel. Intel's a $600 billion company. So that would be a big one. But there's a lot in the supply chain. There's a lot in the AI world, in the space world that they could partner up with if that's the direction that they want to go. But it would be a very different direction. And so everyone will be watching it very, very closely. Anyway, thank you for tuning in. For tuning into TVPN today. Leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, sign up for our newsletter at tvpn.com, and we will see you tomorrow.

And hello to Keith, who seemingly just joined the chat. Hey, Keith. Hey, Keith.

Couple hours late, but happy to have you here.

Few hours late, 3 hours late, but we're happy to have you here.

Come back tomorrow.

Hope you all have a tremendous afternoon. Thank you to Cooper for always coming in at the market close as well. I appreciate it. I appreciate it every day. And have a wonderful afternoon and evening, folks. We'll see you tomorrow.

Goodbye.